On Mar 23, 2014, at 2:36 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203(a)freenet.de> wrote:
On 03/23/2014 08:56 AM, Frank Murphy wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 18:29:02 +0000
> Timothy Murphy <gayleard(a)eircom.net> wrote:
>
>> Ed Greshko wrote:
>>
>>> Does anybody nowadays actually burn CDs or DVDs?
Yes, because unlike USB-sticks, I am archiving them and resort to using them as
"ready-to-use/off-the-bookshelf" media, e.g. in cases of
"emergencies".
Offtopic but for what it's worth pretty much all dye based DVD is effectively
disqualified from archiving because of the massive variance in errors, with the initial
error rates (immediately after writing) busting the relevant standard (ISO/IEC29121). To
even consider it requires ISO/IEC 10995 discs, a dedicated archival recorder, periodic
testing strategy to know when to migrate data to new discs, and proper storage conditions
(low temperature and humidity).
Stamped DVD (packaged movies and games) is a whole different animal, they're reliable
short of microwaving them, but are impractical for backups.
On Mar 23, 2014, at 5:12 AM, Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)yahoo.com.au> wrote:
Just recently I had to boot from USB to install onto a laptop with
no
optical drive. I found four different methods of putting a Linux
installer onto a USB. One of them involved Windows, so that was out.
Two of them were Linux programs for writing installers to the flash
drive. One required adding things to a current install that I didn't
want to do. The other was less painful, and worked for writing one
installer to a USB, but not for another (I tried Fedora and Ubuntu on
this laptop). The last was plain dd if=/install.iso of=/def/flashdrive
(I'm paraphrasing), and that worked for the one that didn't work the
other way.
All of which was more hassle than burning a disc, and was actually
slower than burning a disc for one of the methods (I don't recall which,
but I tend to think it was the dd method).
The slowness of USB writing is probably the block size. I have a Kingston USB that writes
at 20MB/s if the block size is 256KB or larger. At the default of 512 byte block sizes,
it's abysmal, not even 1MB/s. Maybe 250KB/sec? A Lexar USB stick writes at 1MB/s with
512 byte block sizes, and maxes out at 4MB/s. Point being the media makes a big
difference, but they all write slowest with 512 byte block sizes so I'd think
there's possibly some room for optimization here.
Chris Murphy