Tweet
Following in the vein of some recent discussions about which FS is better than which, and why, etc... I just got to burn my freshly downloaded images of the Fedora 10 DVD for i386 and x86_64... Seeing how fast did the machine completed the hash MD5 sum on the x86_64 image, I decided to check the disk activity with GKrellm (I know, not a scientific measure or method, but shows average data throughput). The drive the images are store on is the first partition of an S-ATA II 500Gb drive, formatted in Ext3, left at its defaults as per mkfs.ext3 -L [MYLABEL] /dev/sd?#, I was kind of surprised when I saw the average throughput during the MD5 sum process in K3B of a 3.4 Gb file... 100Mb/s with bursts of 125Mb/s (and this is real-world performance, not theoretical reads from hdparm). None of my drives has achieved these speeds ever. My other two S-ATA (I) drives get at most 60-70Mb/s sequential reads (and one even with a ReiserFS partition until recently), nowhere as fast as this drive. As they say, an image speaks a thousand words... By the way, when I transfered the images from my download server to my main rig, burst writes got as high as 85Mb/s