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Old 05-26-2005, 03:02 PM   #1
bobwall
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floppies mounted in sync mode very slow


Hello all. When I mount a floppy disk or a usb mass storage device with the sync flag in /etc/fstab, writing is unbearably slow. I expected some performance hit, but not by an order of magnitude. I'm thinking maybe this could be a bug with vfat since both the usb drive and floppy use that file system instead of it being an inherent behavior. Any ideas on how to solve it?
 
Old 05-26-2005, 04:11 PM   #2
kencaz
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Interesting question, How slow are you talking about. Can't be that slow for a Floppy, there is only a finite amount of data to write.

I too have seen some proformance drop when using floppies in Linux, however, minimul. I learned the hard way the difference between write-through (sync) or write-back (async).

My current MDK 10.1 uses 'supermount" and is synced, my Slackware box is not synced and I have to make sure to unmount the drive before removing it or I could lose data.

I have noticed though that writing to a floppy with a single 1meg file is faster then 10 100k files, due to more head movement I guess...

Either way... I don't know how you would speed up the write process in sync mode, might be a Kernel issue...

Just a thought

KC
 
Old 05-26-2005, 04:38 PM   #3
bobwall
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By slow, I mean it takes 24 seconds to write a 15k file to the floppy! Faster for the usb drive though. It should take only one second since a floppy drive's throughput is ~50k/second. Ideally I think there should be a mount option such as ext3's commit interval which allows async. io, but guarantees a writeback after a certain time.
 
Old 04-23-2020, 05:38 AM   #4
randywatson
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I too experience the same issue of very slow file operations with sync, but that's the only way to confirm that ie. a file has
been copied to the floppy after the copy dialog has been closed, thus the floppy can be ejected safely.
With async you will risk data loss/corruption when you assume that when the dialog closes you may eject the disk,
when in fact the file operation may not have executed and is still in buffer.

I'm currently using autofs with the sync option.

Last edited by randywatson; 04-23-2020 at 05:40 AM.
 
Old 04-23-2020, 05:48 AM   #5
syg00
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How many respondents of that 15 year old thread really care any more ?.
 
  


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