[PC-BSD Testing] More on: Beta 1 balky using 8GB Thumb, contention issue?
Peter Brewster
peter.brewster at comcast.net
Tue Sep 9 06:21:05 PDT 2008
Bill Leeper is probably correct. The Ozc Rally 2 drive ($23 for 8 GB) is very fast, per Ocz 32 MB/s read and half that for write. I was taken by SanDisk's claim that Cruzer Micro ($30 for 9 GB) is "ReadyBoost" enhanced. My bad! Now I see SanDisk leaves the R/W rates blank in their product comparison chart http://u3.sandisk.com/CompareU3_drives.html .
----- Original Message -----
From: Bill Leeper
To: PC-BSD Testing list
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 9:27 PM
Subject: Re: [PC-BSD Testing] More on: Beta 1 balky using 8GB Thumb,contention issue?
I can confirm your observations on the thumb drive installations. But
I would lay it more to the poor read/write speed of a standard flash
drive. I intend to pick up a high speed flash drive in a month or two
and try it with that. I would suspect that with a 16 GB high speed
flash drive it should do much better.
On Sep 8, 2008, at 4:55 PM, Peter Brewster wrote:
> Some investigation -
>
> 1) Confirmed that Xubuntu on a thumb boots and runs well. What I
> thought was a minor balk is Xubuntu giving to much time to grunt
> work and not enough priority to human interface.
>
> 2) Confirmed that beta-1 takes a long time to boot from a thumb
> drive and then runs in a very balky manor. Operations are
> eventually correct but system is not usable.
>
> 3) Installed a 7200 rpm disk. Beta-1 install took about 20 minutes
> vs. three hours to SanDisk thumb. Operation was very nice from the
> first start. Ksysguard showed similar cpu and memory usage but
> about 10 fewer processes using disk vs. thumb (137 vs. 147.)
>
> Bottom line: I'll give up on the thumb drive for PCBSD . . at least
> for now.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Peter Brewster
> To: Testing at lists.pcbsd.org
> Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2008 6:26 PM
> Subject: Beta 1 balky using 8GB Thumb, contention issue?
>
> System is 2.8 MHz Celeron with .75 GB RAM, no hard drive, USB 2.0.
>
> 1) System had been in use with Xububtu on an 8 GB Ocz thumb. Very
> nice except an occasional one to two second "balk" when launching a
> new application or scrolling in Firefox.
>
> 2) Removed Ocz and plugged in a new SanDisk thumb, fresh from
> package. Tried to install from net. DHCP was OK and target FTP was
> correct. File system went in OK. Looks like install died on first
> file needed. Gave that up.
>
> 3) Burned a three-CD beta-1 set. Installed with Firefox, Office
> and Development selected on third CD. Install took about three
> hours but went OK. However from the first reboot some operations
> took several minutes, either to launch or to so something simple
> such as pull down a menu. But the actions generally seemed correct
> if I waited long enough. Now and then a launch would just get lost
> - including that doggone bouncing thing. The thumb drive had
> about 900 MB free. System was basically unusable.
>
> 4) Removed the SanDisk thumb and WinXP formatted it. (This left
> the U3 partition of 65 MB. That's OK.) Reinstalled just the two
> CDs. Took about two-plus hours. Now KDisk Free shows /dev/da0s1a
> as 76% used with 1.8 GB free. /dev/md0 is 8% used with 700 MB
> free. This looks OK to me. However there is no apparent change in
> the balky behavior. I notice that often, while waiting seconds to
> minutes for some function to appear, clicking on something else will
> cause the first item to happen. I've seen this behavior when
> installing very fast disks on systems that worked well with slower
> disks - usually resolved by paying attention to relative
> priorities. So system is still not usable.
>
> Kris - KDisk also shows a line entry "devfs ? 1 KB 100% used 0
> free" and the thermometer is filled with red. No slashes around
> devfs. I have no idea what that is about and don't know if it is a
> concern.
>
> Peter Brewster
>
>
>
> No virus found in this outgoing message.
> Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com
> Version: 8.0.169 / Virus Database: 270.6.17/1657 - Release Date:
> 9/6/2008 8:07 PM
> _______________________________________________
> Testing mailing list
> Testing at lists.pcbsd.org
> http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo/testing
Computers can be fun again
format C:\
Alternatives are out there
_______________________________________________
Testing mailing list
Testing at lists.pcbsd.org
http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo/testing
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com
Version: 8.0.169 / Virus Database: 270.6.17/1657 - Release Date: 9/6/2008 8:07 PM
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/testing/attachments/20080909/29cc2c88/attachment.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: multipart/alternative
Size: 0 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/testing/attachments/20080909/29cc2c88/attachment.bin
-------------- next part --------------
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com
Version: 8.0.169 / Virus Database: 270.6.17/1657 - Release Date: 9/6/2008 8:07 PM
More information about the Testing
mailing list