I apologise for a longish message. I bought myself a device in which you can put an ide-device an which communicates with the computer through a usb-interface. I put a 60 Gb hard disk and partitioned it into three normal partition (2xreiserfs and 1 ext3) and a swap partition.
My first experiment was to make a local debian mirror using debmirror - and I did not have any problems as I was downloading it from an ftp-site in our network with a download speed of below 1 Mb. I do have some problems with it when copying larger amounts of data from normal hard disks to the device. At home I have a 364Mhz Celeron with 64 Meg ram and I experience a high load average when I write to the usb-device. Using rsync to copy a partition to the usb-device stalled the computer at the stage when it was copying iso-images. During one effort there were usb timeout-errors. That also happened when I tried to do it using "find $1 -depth -xdev -print | cpio -dumpv $2". I then experimented with buffer in the following way: find $1 -depth -xdev -print | buffer -u 100 | cpio -dumpv $2 and I could copy the iso-images without problems although it was slow. I don't think I can use "buffer" with rsync - or can I? Now my questions: 1. Which is the best way to copy large amounts of data to a usb-device? 2. How can I install Debian on such a device? 3. hdparm would not work on the device (mounted as a scsi device). How can I improve the transfer rate? Regards. Johann -- Johann Spies Telefoon: 021-808 4036 Informasietegnologie, Universiteit van Stellenbosch "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Romans 5:1 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]