Can placing some data on a DVD some on a HDD speed up reading?

General · 03-13-2015, 12:08 AM

I know that some people setup RAID0 or RAID1 to get faster reads, because data is pulled from two different devices.

I have some software that needs to quickly read two files. Then two more, then two more. All of the files are stored in pairs. Assume I do not ever need to modify the data, would it be faster to put half of my data on a DVD and the other half on an HDD?

veerain · 03-13-2015, 12:32 AM

Hard drive speed is much more than a DVD.

DVD running at 24X has a transfer speed of 33MB/s.
Hard disk of these days have a typical transfer speed of 100MB/s or more. Use 'hdparm -t /dev/sdx' to measure.

So answer would be using a DVD won't speed up much and HDD is the better one.

unSpawn · 03-13-2015, 01:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by General

Assume I do not ever need to modify the data, would it be faster to put half of my data on a DVD and the other half on an HDD?

Memory is even faster. Provided you have enough why not use shared memory?

metaschima · 03-13-2015, 12:03 PM

If you had two devices of similar throughput, then it would speed things up. Two devices of different throughput are harder to deal with. One device would obviously lag behind the other and may actually slow down the whole process.