[clug] fastest way to copy a fs

[Richard Reynolds]

> Remember to put the source and destination disk on different  controllers, 
> whether you're using IDE,

assuming that the only task is the copy (kinda hinted to below) thats really 
only good on FAST IDE drives,

> I'm not  sure how "smart" SCSI is.
and can work backwards here, depending on the controller itself. cheaper 
controllers = slower!

> SATA,
that can go either way, but generally less of an issue depending on exactly 
how you define controller and how smart the controllers behave

> USB or FireWire.
avoid USB in a dream world max is only 60MB/sec reality sets in and your 
down in the 20MB/sec range, while still slow firewire 400 will be faster but 
Firewire 800 isnt soo bad

> Having the disks on different controllers  means the bottleneck is halving 
> the bandwidth of the PCI bus rather  than halving the bandwidth of the 
> drive controller.
really only a bottleneck if the controller is half as fast as the PCI bus. 
133MB/s is a hard game to catch with sustained reads/writes

> The catch with  USB is figuring out whether you have one USB root hub with 
> a bunch of  ports sticking out the back of your computer, or you have an 
> independent USB root hub controlling each port (or group of ports,  such 
> as front panel/back panel).
unfortunately this also just depends if the controller ports 
decode/re-encode the signal then the speed is nearly identical between 2 
controllers, either way the computer side USB 2.0 controller itself wont be 
the limiting factor here either.


>> I will then select the fastest one, which I can benchmark myself,
feel free to, but benchmarks are published for many of these already google 
turned up a ton of results that seemed right on.

Richard Reynolds
richard.reynolds at usa.net