On 00:12 13 Aug 2004, Anand Buddhdev <anand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: | Thom Paine wrote: | >I have a DVD-RAM disc that I'd like to do some backups to. Would I just | >format this disc with ext3 and make a filesystem on it, or would I treat | >it like a DVD-RW disc? | | I recommend that you create an ext2 filesystem on it. The journalling | features of ext3 are not necessary on DVD-RAM discs. When mounting it, | use the 'noatime' mount option, to avoid atime updates on the files on | the disc each time you read them. The atime updates are writes, and they | will reduce the number of times you can write to the disc. I do my | backups (using rsync) like this to a DVD-RAM disc, and it works very well. I too have a DVD-RAM and would have recommended ext3 over ext2 because on the odd occasion you unmount uncleanly (power failure etc) a fsck on a DVD-RAM is Very Slow. But if your use is "put it in, mount, backup, unmount" then this may well be rare enough to not worry about. The noatime remark is right on. On the other hand I'm not sure how journalling affects the number of write cycles to the sectors it occupies; I'd expect it may raise them. But on the same topic, I'd expect ext2 or ext3 to heavily use some portions of the disc at the expense of others. So perhaps it's worth looking for a filesystem that's tuned for a limited write medium (aren't there one or two aimed at Flash devices, which has similar requirements)? Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <cs@xxxxxxxxxx> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ You know what I wish? I wish all the scum of the Net had one throat and I had my hands about it. - Rorschach (1985)
