anderstornvig.dk

My reason for writing this little entry occured recently – a week or so – when I attended a LAN party. At this LAN party we use this old school giant IBM hub we got for free – 12 ports, 10/100 MB/s. We have become quite attached to it over the years and we refuse not to use it. It’s gone through a couple of pimping sessions resulting in a golden colour with a silver text on the top saying “KCP”. We also installed a blue fan on the side to make it look even kinkier. It’s great, and it has this switch making us able to switch the speed to 10MB/s which we occasionally use when we get all nostalgic.

The network transfer

OK but back to business. At this event I had to copy a lot of gigabytes through this hub. So I did what I had to do – start Samba to smbmount, fire up mc and so on. I wasn’t far into the transfer before I realised that this went slower than a turtle on drugs. It certainly wouldn’t finish in my life time. Of course I reckon that it was an old hub, slow too and with games being played through it. I don’t really know where the bottleneck is. I still however blame Samba or some other Linux related issue. Transfering to my Windows partition when booted up in Windows didn’t cause any sluggishness.

The USB transfer

Later on I also copied files from an NTFS formatted external USB hdd (not mine). I plugged in the disk, fdisk’d, mounted and started the copy as I normally do with USB storage devices. Once again the problem occured. I experienced transfer rates just exceeding 4 maybe 5 MB’s per second. It was so annoying because I really couldn’t get anything done. And mc kept asking me questions about permissions for this and that. So there I sat for hours (while watching the Elephant Man actually) and hit Return.. Quite stupid.

The problem

Afterwards I did some research – some would call it completely unreliable and superficial but what the crap..

To access a NTFS formatted partition in Linux with writing permission one will have to use the ntfs-3g driver. It has become stable recently (2007-02-21 actually) and is still under heavy development. This is all good, and it sure is great with better Windows compatibility to the task of spreading Linux all over the universe. But like many other drivers for Linux this driver is reverse engineered. It’s not a popular term but when it’s the only option – because some companies won’t share their precious secrets – then it’s actually a quite admireable quest.

They have really done a great job with this driver. It works and it’s stable. Sadly – as I learned at KCP – it still lacks a bit behind on performance. Which I also read later here http://ntfs-3g.org/performance.html. It says “Please note that ntfs-3g is NOT optimized yet“. And of course it’s perfectly fair, just annoying. As a result the transfer – like with the network – went OK in Windows reaching tranfer rates 30-40 MB/s. Defragmentation (which NTFS occasionally wants) should help a tad. But that’s just too much trouble, isn’t it? So.. What’s a boy to do? Switch back to Windows aka. the bright side? Never!.. Wait for an improved version of the ntfs-3g driver? Sure.. Or just never put myself in a position where I have to deal with NTFS? Oh yeah. It’s an evil file system for Linux and there’s always an alternative way to go..