A long wait…

This post was originally posted on dotkoyi.hobby-site.org, which is my home server on 1 December 2007. This home server has to be taken down due to some technical reasons.

Just bought a new 320GB external USB hard disk from the Internet and it was delivered in the afternoon. The last one I bought was about 3 years ago. Since then data has been growing and recently I couldn’t even defrag it since Windows complained that it has too little free space left. So, time for a new one I thought (or a new filesystem without the need to defrag and acessible from all major OSes?). So here it is.

I have been spending the whole afternoon just for moving data from the old to the new one, so I would have my personal stuff on one and work-related stuff on the other. And I noticed something funny regarding the time needed to move data.

First, I moved some 40GB worth of files, which consist of some individual 2GB files (smart reader would recognize this as the consequence of using FAT filesystem which can only handle 2GB per file at most). And surprisingly, it didn’t take a very long time. Now, I am moving about 3GB of files, consisting variable file sizes which are comparatively small. And the time it took has already exceeded that of the 40GB worth of 2GB files. Well maybe this is not something new to find out about and rather predictable, I didn’t know the difference would be so big.