Install question #1 - repository location

[Tim]

On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 16:40 -0400, Bill Davidsen 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. 

Don't forget to take into account some speed gauges give you results in
bits per second, other in bytes per second...

I can't speak for USB sticks, but just about anything should be faster
than optical drives.  Well, USB 1.0 hosts or drives might be a bit slow.
As you say, seek time, spin up and down time, reading difficulties,
etc., all make optical drives slower to install from.

As a comparison, I found an install from RPM files on a hard drive
(local, or network), did a complete basic install in a bit over 15
minutes.  But, the process often took over an hour if I used optical
media.

Installs from optical media only ran quicker on some drives and
computers.  I'm guessing the install routines can't access every DVD or
CD drive at full speed (variations in UDMA modes for drives and hosts,
etc.).

-- 
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

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