/mnt/usbdrive
When I reinstalled Debian sid, I had left a partition on the new
hard drive large enough to hold my music but had yet to
rsync the music from my
server. I had never really put much thought into the transfer speed
over my home network, I just knew that copying that many files
would take a while. It took almost
26 hours.
Number of files: 21726
Number of files transferred: 19310
Total file size: 93259911200 bytes
Total transferred file size: 93259911200 bytes
Literal data: 93259911200 bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 782736
File list generation time: 31.767 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 93272942604
Total bytes received: 439336
sent 93272942604 bytes received 439336 bytes 997997.89 bytes/sec
total size is 93259911200 speedup is 1.00
mp3sync 7481.33s user 2922.24s system 11% cpu 25:57:58.61 total
That's quite a long time! I then realized that if I bought a
USB
harddrive enclosure and put a blank drive in it, I could just
plug it in any computer and copy the files over the USB cable
instead of ethernet. I picked one up for about $50 and put in a
blank drive. I thought that if I wanted to allow iTunes on my
roommate's Windows XP computer to see the files I should format the
drive with a FAT32 filesystem. I don't know how to that stuff in
windows so I first plugged it into my linux desktop, partitioned
the drive and then formatted it with mkfs.vfat and mounted it, then
copied all my music onto the new drive again using the incredibly
awesome rsync, this time it was much faster...
Number of files: 21726
Number of files transferred: 19310
Total file size: 93259911200 bytes
Total transferred file size: 93259911200 bytes
Literal data: 93259911200 bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 780968
File list generation time: 1.217 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 93272940832
Total bytes received: 439336
sent 93272940832 bytes received 439336 bytes 24036433.49 bytes/sec
total size is 93259911200 speedup is 1.00
rsync -avpsrd /mp3 /media/usbdrive 1060.05s user 879.75s system 49% cpu
1:04:55.25 total
...about 24 hours faster :-) The only thing left to do was to plug
it into my roommate's computer and load up some songs onto my iPod
with iTunes, but of course there was a hitch, Windows XP would not
initialize the drive, because apparently, if your drive is over
32GB (mine is 250GB) it somehow hits some stupid FAT32 filesystem
upper limit. XP would only offer to format the drive to NTFS but of
course read/write support for NTFS in linux is still a little
sketchy due to Microsoft's unwilling-less to open their source code
to those hippie linux hackers. So, I can plug in a hard drive with
a FAT32 filesystem onto a linux computer without a hitch, but
Windows XP is unable to read a drive formatted with
one of its
own native file systems. Nice.
The solution was to boot my Windows XP cdrom, press f10 to get the
recovery console, and then use the format command, for some reason
Windows will then format the entire 250GB's, because your using the
magical recovery console. Then I plugged it back into linux, redid
the rsync and plugged it back into XP and finally saw the files. I
decided to ask my IT guy at work why I cannot format a drive in
windows XP using the exquisitely named "
Windows XP Disk
Management snap-in" and he said something along the lines of
"
you need to do low level formatting, cant do that in
userspace" to which I replied "
but its a snap-in!!" and
stormed off.
Anyway, all is well now and I am kicking myself for not getting one
of these USB drive thingies earlier.
