file systems

[jonsnipes]

i've searched through the boards but cannot find a "yes" answer i need before messing with stuff...

i currently have a 275gb hardrive with all of my media on it formated in hfs+ which linux will not read.  im setting up a new computer to act as a core and need to convert this file system.  i can read/write hfs+ through windows using macdrive and copy to a new harddrive to ntfs.  from there what would i be better off doing..  use linux to convert and move the files to ext3 or will 0710 have good enough support for ntfs to leave the files there??  concidering the time involved to move 250gb of information across different file systems id prefer not to go hfs+ - ntfs - etx3 and then ext3 to the hard drive i want it o. plus the time involved to swap OS's


(harddrive avialible to work with are 400gb sata (to be library) 275gb ide (current hfs+ library) 20gb ide (for OS))

[rrambo]

7.04 can read hfs...  I've got a 400gb external usb drive formatted hfs that I use between my mac and my linux machines..

[posterberg]

Why not put the new harddrive in the linux machine at once, ext-3 formatted. Share it and mount that share on the windows machine that can read your hfs disk. Should be smooth and easy... 250 GB over 100Mbit or 1Gbit is ok, you don't have to stand and watch it... ;-)

[jonsnipes]

7.04 can read hfs but not hfs+...  the journaling thows it off.. already tried

forgot to add that the computer will be able to triple boot linux, xp and mac..  what im looking for i guess is a nice filesystem that the three can share with no troubles

[jonsnipes]

i windows able to write to ext3 with no problems??  id hate to tranfer everything and later find errors and unplayible files.

[posterberg]

There should be addons to make windows access ext2 you can always convert to ext3 after you have transferred the files.

I don't know if this is against the forum policy, but here's a link to something that can read/write ext2 in windows - http://www.fs-driver.org/

Plz - tell me if posting a link like this is out of line!

[Matthew]

Why not put the new harddrive in the linux machine at once, ext-3 formatted. Share it and mount that share on the windows machine that can read your hfs disk. Should be smooth and easy... 250 GB over 100Mbit or 1Gbit is ok, you don't have to stand and watch it... ;-)

250GB over "100Mbps" ethernet/SMB (Windows Share) will never get 100Mbps, maybe more like 40Mbps, or even less. So that 2Tb will take 5000s, or about half an hour, at best, possibly much longer.

If you plug the HFS+ drive into one Linux IDE bus (preferably without sharing that cable with another drive that will share its bandwidth), and the new drive into the SATA interface, you'll probably get the full IDE bandwidth (100 or 133 Mbps, depending on your IDE host chip), which will probably be something like 3-5x as fast, or 6-10 minutes for 275MB.

Since you have to install the SATA drive anyway, I'd do it all on the local machine, if there's an unoccupied IDE cable.

[rrambo]

7.04 can read hfs but not hfs+...  the journaling thows it off.. already tried

forgot to add that the computer will be able to triple boot linux, xp and mac..  what im looking for i guess is a nice filesystem that the three can share with no troubles

sorry, I meant that my drive IS hfs+..  I have no trouble reading it from my mac or my linux machine...

[jonsnipes]

ill double check about the linux hfs+ but i dont think it was working..  is there any special driver you needed??  im using fs-driver on my windows machine now but ive heard it isnt the best with writing to ext filesystems.. if thats wrong itd be great because then i could just use windows to copy straight from one disk to the other..  anyone know is ext2 or ext3 is supported through mac leopard by chance??

[posterberg]

Another, more far fetched, suggestion could be:

Starting up a virtualmachine in either Virtualbox or vmware? Then you could have two OS's running at the same time each supporting appropriate filesystems...

I know that at least Virtualbox can share folders with the host os...

[jonsnipes]

virtual machine end up slowing the computer down a good bit though..  i think ill just use windows to copy everything...  thanks for everyones help

[posterberg]

virtual machine end up slowing the computer down a good bit though..  i think ill just use windows to copy everything...  thanks for everyones help

I have to disagree heavily on that. I use VM's everyday at work, using some quite heavy applications without notifyable performance degree. You need some RAM of course but I doubt that you need any major amounts of RAM just for copying files. Boot up i.e. damn small linux inside XP, I guess you can run that without performance problems in a VM with just 128MB of RAM assigned to it...

[niz23]

I agree with posterberg sort of.

Iám responsible for a big Vmware installation in sweden @ a sport retailer company.
We have a lot of ESX boxes with 32GB+ RAM connected to a SAN with 32GB cache, and I can tell you, our VMs fly.
On the other hand we have spent a lot of $$$ too.

What posterberg mean is right but Vmware ESX or equal products are not available to most home owners, and performance cannot be compared between datacenter products and virtualization tools available for home use.
The two weakest parts in a VM is disc IO and networking, they both need a lot of CPU to work good since the hypervisor need to emulate  a complete ide/scsi card or network card and that eat cpu cycles if you copy huge amounts of data.
The other problem is performance of ordinary computer equipment available at home.
A sata drive can only do about 80IO/s, which translated using 128kb block mean about 10MB/s as long as you copy data from one physical drive to another. Many people run VMs on the same harddrive as everything else and doing big file copies with that setup will get you a huge performance penalty.

I´am not starting a vendor/virtualization tool war here, just trying to explain why there may be a performance degradation in a virtual machine and since english is not my native language it might be hard to understand.

/niz23

[hari]

250GB over "100Mbps" ethernet/SMB (Windows Share) will never get 100Mbps, maybe more like 40Mbps, or even less. So that 2Tb will take 5000s, or about half an hour, at best, possibly much longer.

With correct network and host configuration you should be able to get at about 11 megabytes per second over 100mbit.

regards,
hari

[posterberg]

I am running VirtualBox and VMPlayer, have played aroung with VM Workstation as well. I understand that ESX comes with more performance but I am quite certain that the ones I suggested will be sufficient just for file copying.

I also believe that it should be quickly done over a network share, probably completed before a virtual machine could be installed... ;-)