On Thursday 05 Jul 2007, Chris Dennis wrote:
> I forgot to mention that I use ext2 on my DVD-RAMs.
>
> And I've been having a lot of trouble with that lately -- running
> e2fsck -fy
> on a DVD-RAM seems to make it instantly unusable. It used to work
> fine on my old PC, with an IDE DVD-RAM drive. Now I've got a SATA
> DVD-RAM drive attached to 64-bit Debian it's much worse! Maybe I
> should raise a bug report...
>
> > That's about 37.5% of the advertised performance of the setup. Ah
> > well...
> >
> > In case anyone isn't put off DVD-RAM and wants to format the
> > disks for fat32 there is a small hurdle in that you get this
> > warning:
> >
> > unable to get drive geometry, using default 255/63
>
> Perhaps there's a clue there to my ext2 problems -- fdisk reports
> different geometry on my old and new systems.
I'm struggling to think DVD-RAM is worth the effort after another day
of woes. The latest is that it just won't play nicely with another
CD/DVD drive on the same cable. I've tried:
- Two different drives, one by the same manufacturer (LiteOn)
- 40 wire and 80 wire ribbons
- Switching off the second drive in the BIOS
- Swapping Master/Slave
Whatever I do the very presence of another drive on the cable makes
the system give spurious 'tray open' and 'input output error'
messages and truncate files over about 150MB. I've updated the
drive's flash so I suspect it's Linux or the m/board. Presumable even
an idle drive chats a bit and that must be mucking up a big DMA write
on the same cable.
So I've left the second drive in the PC but disconnected it and it now
works FINE.
By FINE I mean that I can transfer my backups to the DVD-RAM
(formatted ext2) at about 1GB/hour, that's around .3 MB/s. I have
nearly 15GB of backups :-(
I can't use vfat because my backups involve symbolic links so I'll try
using udf and make sure that no individual file is over the current
1GB limit.
Fun fun fun
Peter
