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On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, george parker wrote:
On Tuesday 09 March 2010, Julian Hall wrote:'By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8557144.stmCutting out all the discussions about calculating disc sizes and quick fixes for XP, I seem to remember having this argument about sector sizes maybe 10 or 12 years ago (maybe 15 years ago) when the problem was the size of disc the operating system could handle. One thing that came up then that I haven't seen a mention of in this thread was the size of files. A file takes up a minimum of a sector so if you have a small file of say 200 bytes then if your sector size is 512 it takes 512 and if it is 4k then that's what it takes. And there are an awful lot of small files on a linux system. Or am I having a senior moment?
It's a never-ending problem - the issue of storing small files vs. disk wastage vs. efficiency vs. some other random parameter...
Then there is the limit to the number of files that you can actuall store on a given disk - that's goverened by the filing system itself, but there will (again) be trade-off's of file size & numbers vs. efficiency... These days you're unlikely to meet the number of files limitation before the disk fills up, but in the old days of running usenet servers it was a classic problem.
There is a lot ot tuning that can be done at format (mkfs) time though - and this will depend a lot on you knowing what to actually do rather then pick the defaults - it's just one more thing that's going to be a "dying art" unless you're a proper sysadmin type - for most people you'll just have to trust that the person(s) who built your distribution picked sensible defaults...
Then there's the choice of which filesystem to use...So, really, without knowing what the intended use of the disks is going to be, it's hard to choose anything other than the generic defaults - e.g. if you're building a system to store your CDs/DVDs on - it will mostly have very large files, so you might pick some sort of optimisation there, or a system to store many little text files - something else, etc...
Anyone using ext4 yet? Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html