Hey,

I just installed a second harddisc into my Myth-box. It mounts under /myth/video/Archive.

Now two questions:

- Is there a way to get Samba to recognize that as soon as I'm down in this directory, the free space aviable should change?

- Copying from one disc to the other strikes me as rather slow and cpu-intense. They are both IDE-discs (/dev/hda and /dev/hdd), on seperate cables, both ext3. Is it normal that copying 15gb takes 30min and 100% CPU?

Thanks,
christian

Couple of tips on ide devices....

IDE devices are directly controlled by the CPU. If you want a less CPU intensive device, you are going to spend quite a bit more money to use SCSI.

Most people put their CD/DVD drive on the second IDE bus. In any case mixing this device with an IDE drive will give you problems. Every CD/DVD drive I have seen on the market, (and this is not comprehensive, but you can check yours during bootup) is a DMA Mode 2 device. Most HD's on the market today are DMA Mode 5 or 6. The higher the Mode number, the faster the drive is capable of sending or receiving data. The problem is that once the bios detects the capabilities of all of the devices on each IDE bus, it will set the mode for that bus at the lowest number of the various devices on that bus. Thus if you have hda being a mode 5 device, hdc (or possibly sdc) as your CD/DVD mode 2 drive, and hdd as a mode 6 device, hdd will be treated by the computer as a mode 2 drive.

In most cases you are going to be better off having two Hard Drives on the same IDE bus than having one on one bus, and the other mixed with a CD/DVD on another bus.

Actual transfer speed will depend on the actuall read/write capabilities of the physical drive, once you exceed the buffer capacity on the drive. Surprisingly this is often still around 33 Mbit/sec, or a little over 4 MBytes/sec. (varies by implementation)

You will also want to go through the various tips and hints around here, looking for tips on using hdparm to confirm that you have an optimized configuration, or test some alternate configurations. (Note this has the potential of giving you some unusable configurations, and you may have difficulty recovering from them, so don't do some of the more experimental things on a system you would be concerned about loosing any data on.)

Good luck.

-Rusty

_________________
Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)