On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm trying to find the best location for a repository to do FC8 > installs. My first two trials were direct from DVD and NFS mounted. The > NFS mount showed that the max data rate to the new machine was only > about 12MB/s, so transfer rate isn't an issue, it's Gbit connection. > Therefore, I suspect that seek time may be an issue, I'm wondering if > people have compared putting the repository on a USB stick instead of > network. > > -- > Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> Drive seek times are in the range of 8 - 20 ms. Your NFS server's hard drive has 8 - 32 MB of cache. The server's I/O driver provides additional caching/buffering. Data is being accessed sequentially, i.e. beginning of file to end of file. Unless the server has a heavy I/O workload the disk access/seek times should be completely masked by the buffering. How is the server drive's seek time a limiting factor when your target system also has to store that same data on its own drive? Flash drive install will be faster because you eliminate the networking protocol overhead.
