On Mon, 15 May 2006 12:12:29 -0700
John Jason Jordan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dijo:

> On Mon, 15 May 2006 14:02:26 -0400
> Vadim Garber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dijo:
> 
> > On my internal 80GB drive, low rpm one I get...
> > 
> > hdparm -t /dev/hda
> > 
> > /dev/hda:
> >  Timing buffered disk reads:   80 MB in  3.07 seconds =  26.05 MB/sec
> > 
> > Kind of sad... Firewire comes in at ~24MB/sec.

> My R3240 (60 GB, 4200 rpm) is even worse:
> 
> sudo hdparm -t /dev/hda
> /dev/hda:
>  Timing buffered disk reads:   72 MB in  3.01 seconds =  23.90 MB/sec
> 
> This is why I bought a new 7200 rpm Hitachi Travelstar. 



OK, the new 80 GB Travelstar is installed and fully functional. Before
attempting the upgrade I bought a USB enclosure for it, then attached
it to a USB port to clone the existing 60 GB drive to it. I waited
until a local LUG had a Linux Clinic (today) to perform this
operation, as I was unsure of the best way to do the cloning.

When I arrived at the Clinic I had not even partitioned or formatted the
new drive, so that was the first step. With some assistance I created a
swap and a regular partition to mirror what I had on the original 60 GB
drive. I left the remaining 20 GB unpartitioned to use sometime in the
future for a new installation. (Maybe 64-bitDapper, since I now have
64-bit Breezy.)

Then we attempted to do the cloning. That didn't go as well. First we
tried Dump, attempting to do a restore at the same time as a dump, in
order to mirror the existing drive on the new drive. Unfortunately,
Dump had fits when it got to my chroot environment. We couldn't easily
get past the problem, so we gave up. Instead we booted to a live CD and
just used cp -a to copy everything onto the new drive. Then we manually
edited Grub. 

I swapped the disks (way easy -- just a few screws!) and rebooted. Grub
messed up at first, but we got it booted with Safe Mode. Once we had
it booted we fixed Grub. And then I rebooted a few times to make sure
everything was working properly. I am happy to report that everything
is functioning perfectly now, exactly as before. Exactly as before,
that is, except that the computer is much faster. Note my hdparm scores
on the old drive listed above. Here is what I get now:

   [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/hda
   /dev/hda:
   Timing buffered disk reads:  134 MB in  3.05 seconds =  44.00 MB/sec

Wow! Nearly twice as fast! And it feels like it too. The computer boots
way faster than before. Everything seems to work much faster. Loading
an existing OO.o Writer document is almost instantaneous.

Well worth the $139 I paid for the 80 GB Travelstar! Plus I now have a
leftover 60 GB 4200 rpm drive to use for something.
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