svn-1400, flac and NSLU: Performance problems?

[wolfzell]

I am using a de-underclocked NSLU with uNSLUng 6.8, a 500GB Maxtor drive attached to it (formatted with NTFS) and I have a library with 12500 files, most of them (11000) in flac format.

Now if a file is playing (Firefly transcoding), I have problems searching in the library. For instance listing interprets, does not work at all. I can list the albums, but if I want to load the songs of a specific album from there, the loading fails. If I press “Pause” before, it works fine.

Now I could just format the drive in EXT3, it will most probably work faster, but how can I get my 350 GB library on the drive then? It will take weeks over the network and Windows XP can’t write to the drive if connected via USB 2.0.

Any help would be appreciated, because I would love to keep the NSLU, but I fear in the end regarding my huge library, I will have to migrate to a media server pc. 🙁

bye
Wolfgang

[fizze]

heya,
Im in the same boat. Just my HD is 250G.

The solution most likely is a ext2/3 driver for windows. There are a couple floating around, and they are pretty stable, I heard.

I have like 8K titles in my library, and have the same problems.
Whats worse, other tasks get suspended during a media-scan, and the slug generally behaves unstable with ongoing NTFS I/O activity.

I dont know if tools like partitionmagic or acronis diskdirector are capable of converting NTFS to ext2, which would rock.

[cromei]

I guess I cheated 🙂
I have 2 250G hard drives I put the NTFS on port1 and the other drive on port 2.
I then formatted and unslung one drive using the slug.
Then using telnet to the slug I did a mass copy from the NTFS drive to the Slug formatted drive.
reconfigured Firefly and was off and running.
Craig

[wolfzell]

@fizze wrote:

The solution most likely is a ext2/3 driver for windows. There are a couple floating around, and they are pretty stable, I heard.

Hm. “Pretty stable” is not good enough for me. Googled for the drivers and was not so happy with what I found.

Actually I prefer to solve a problem without getting other ones in exchange.

bye
Wolfgang

[rpedde]

@wolfzell wrote:

@fizze wrote:

The solution most likely is a ext2/3 driver for windows. There are a couple floating around, and they are pretty stable, I heard.

Hm. “Pretty stable” is not good enough for me. Googled for the drivers and was not so happy with what I found.

Actually I prefer to solve a problem without getting other ones in exchange.

bye
Wolfgang

You are looking for a one-time solution to copy files that’s faster than over-the-network, right? I could agree that you probably wouldn’t want to run an enterprise datacenter with the ext2 drivers around, but they are certainly good enough for a one-shot copy.

Failing that, you could always boot with knoppix cd or something similar with captive ntfs and native ext3.

In the end, though, you might be right. 350G of music on a device with 32m of ram probably isn’t a long-term winner. Particularly while doing stuff as cpu intensive as transcoding on a machine with no FPU.

[wolfzell]

@rpedde wrote:

You are looking for a one-time solution to copy files that’s faster than over-the-network, right? I could agree that you probably wouldn’t want to run an enterprise datacenter with the ext2 drivers around, but they are certainly good enough for a one-shot copy.

One-time… hmm… no, it will happen more often, since I have my main library on my system here and I am always changing little things, so I copy all data to the external drive about every two months. And I am using the drive for storing other data too…

But even if it would be one-time, some of the problems the drivers have, are problems with the character sets. I already have problems with the filenames now, I guess I don’t want another translation step in the progress messing around with the filenames.

Failing that, you could always boot with knoppix cd or something similar with captive ntfs and native ext3.

Installing a complete OS on the PC just to be able to copy files and in the end run some music? Errm…

In the end, though, you might be right. 350G of music on a device with 32m of ram probably isn’t a long-term winner. Particularly while doing stuff as cpu intensive as transcoding on a machine with no FPU.

You are right. For the moment I will keep things running as they are, next time I will have some spare money, I will setup a server/media pc. That will solve several problems at once.

Most likely it will run Firefly nonetheless. 🙂

Thanx for your help and for Firefly.

bye
Wolfgang

[Joshua]

One could boot a PC with a Knoppix live CD (http://www.knopper.net) and have EXT access to the drive. FAT32 access is stable, NTFS read access OK. Wouldn’t try NTFS write access, though.

[rpedde]

Failing that, you could always boot with knoppix cd or something similar with captive ntfs and native ext3.

Installing a complete OS on the PC just to be able to copy files and in the end run some music? Errm…

As joshua mentions, Knoppix is a “live” cd. You boot right up into linux from the CD — it need not be installed. Your system could continue to be windows, but you could use the drivers etc from knoppix to do the copies.

Plus, you’d be able to take advantage of some of the fast synchronizing software like unison or rsync.

Also, if you rsynced it the first time, you’d probably be able to rsync it from then on whenever you “updated” your music. Rsync updates only copy what changed, so if you do it frequently, the update process won’t be long. That’s how I keep my server library synchronized with my “real” library.

— Ron

[wolfzell]

Thank you all very much for the help. I will think about it.

But the next time I will have a little more time for experimenting will be around christmas, so for the time now I guess I will rather take a smaller harddisk (around 200 GB), format it to ext3 and convert my library to mp3, so the NSLU will not have to do any transcoding anymore.

I will still be able to play my flac files over the PC anytime if I need sound quality.

bye
Wolfgang

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