On Friday 26 September 2003 11:24 am, expatriate wrote:

Benjamin P Myers wrote:

...

The recent Toshiba DVD-RAM thread reminds me that I need to ask about a problem I had with my toshiba dvd ram.

I'm using ext2 filesystems on my dvdrams. It seems that small transfers work fine, and reads work fine, however when someone tries to copy a large amount of data to the dvdram the machine works fine for awhile, but the load average gets higher and higher until the machine becomes unresponsive. A few times the machine has come back, if I recall correctly, but this has made the dvdram pretty useless for the reason we got it (backup). I'm running SuSE-8.1. I've been meaning to sic vmstat on it, but haven't gotten around to it yet, as I'd have to install the dvdram again. Has anyone else had similar problems with dvdrams? Any solutions?

Thanks -Ben

Being quite lazy I haven't done more than create an early-morning cron job to tar everything under my home directory and then untarring it onto the Toshiba DVD-RAM. This amounts to about 4.1GB every day. The biggest file size is around 100MB. The machine does become a lot less responsive with aggravating lags between mouse movements and the actual cursor displaying such movement along with other things. This is why I scheduled the backups for times I'm usually in bed or in a bar somewhere. The machine's response makes it difficult to do any work but it has always come back. I've even ctrl-Z'd to get some work done and then foregrounded later. Have you tried using nice? By the way, I use 8.2

Thanks for the reply. That sounds almost exactly like the problem I've been having. Glad to hear someone else has the same problem. I'd searched lkml and not found much. I haven't tried using nice. The machine is messed up right now, (Installs of 8.1 w/ raid and lvm are a bit of a pain) but one of these days.... I wonder if the problem shows on other models of dvdram. Anyway, Thanks. -Ben