Install question #1 - repository location

[Kam Leo]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> 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.
>
>  --
>  Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>

Drive seek times are in the range of 8 - 20 ms. Your NFS server's hard
drive has 8 - 32 MB of cache. The server's I/O driver provides
additional caching/buffering. Data is being accessed sequentially,
i.e. beginning of file to end of file. Unless the server has a heavy
I/O workload the disk access/seek times should be completely masked by
the buffering.

How is the server drive's seek time a limiting factor when your target
system also has to store that same data on its own drive?

Flash drive install will be faster because you eliminate the
networking protocol overhead.