PogoPlug Series 4 questions and advise wanted.

[hpglow]

I bought a PPv4 with the sole intent to install Arch on it. I will be going forward with the task this week, I hope. I have searched and found most of what I need to know so far. I mostly use my NAS right now for backing up, and media serving. My intent is to install PlugUI, samba, and miniDLNA.

Here is issue one. The main drive I will be using to store material on is a USB 3.0 Seagate GoFlex 3TB. I have it formatted NTFS, because most the PCs on my home network are Windows and it is nice to unmount it and walk it over when I need to get that awsome 100 to 110 MB/sec tranfer. I have searched and found that performance is pretty bad with NTFS and the PogoPlug series, but I haven't seen anyone with a series 4 post any numbers. I know I'm grasping here, but is there any decent performance to be had with NTFS? My current router (e4200 v1) with the built in file serving function averages about 3 to 6 MB/sec with that drive.

Next question. Does it matter performance wise if I use a SATA HDD or a USB stick for the main Linux partition and swap on the PP series 4? Does it hit the swap a lot? It's ram is small so I'm assuming it would but I don't know, I'm no Linux guru I run it but never on anything with less than 16Gb ram so I'm generally not worried about anything hogging memory.

Final question. Is there a package that will find formats on my media server and auto-transcode them to something all my devices will use?

Thanks to all who reply.

[moonman]

1. If anything, the performance will be lower with PPv4 due to it's slower CPU. The main problem of NTFS-3g is that it kills the cpu on writes. Reads are more or less fast.

2. Sata boots up faster and if you will be running lots of program, it's better to havw swap on the sata drive.

3.You may want to forget about transcoding on these devices with slow emulated FPU. Last time I tried 1min video took 10-20 min to transcode

[hpglow]

Maybe I will just bite the bullet and format it EXT4. It would kill any opportunity to utilize it directly with any Windows PC but if it brings me decent performance it may be worth the effort.

I will have to look through my file cabenet and see if I have any unused SATA laptop HDDs. If not then I will get to decide between a cheap SSD or a cheap 2.5" HDD. Being as I am hosting the content on the external HDD I don't have to worry about the capacity of the boot drive. But this brings up a new question that I may have to find out for myself... can a swap volume be mounted on a drive attached to the USB 3.0 bus? I only ask because the device can't yet be booted from the USB 3.0 bus.

Thanks for the advise, I will be doing some looking around this week to see if I can come up with a solution.

[moonman]

you should have no problem putting swap on a different hdd

[hpglow]

I just got done testing the PP s4 with the stock software running and this is what I got...

Write 15 MB / sec
Read 10 MB /sec

Better than the built in server that my router has. I found it odd that the writes are higher than the reads, I have never seen that. The Pogoplug software is real anoying, so now I'm going to go do what I bout this thing for and that is to install Arch on it. After that I will make the determination if I want to try EXT 3 or EXT 4.

[moonman]

Honestly, it really is worth it to convert the drive to ext3/4. For windows there is an opensource ext2 driver which will pick up your ext3/4 partitions as well as all ext file systems are backwards compatible.

[hpglow]

I've decided I'm going to do that. I'm thinking that I will go with EXT3 only because I have had better luck with Windows machines reading it.

I made a huge mistake last night though so it will be some time before this gets done. Here is the scenario, I started GParted live last night right before bed. For some reason it wouldn't read the HDD on the USB 3.0 port so I plugged it into the 2.0 port. I started an operation to shrink the NTFS file system so I could add a Linux swap to the drive. I started it and went to bed, woke up this morning and it says I still have 16 hours remaining. I tried to cancel but it tells me I could ruin the data. I could have loaded windows and made that partition smaller in about 30 seconds. Lesson learned though, next time just back it all up and destroy the partition and start from scratch. Resizing a 3T HDD over a USB 2.0 port == bad idea.

[moonman]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/ This driver adds ext4 support. I suppose ext4 isn't that backwards compatible :\

[hpglow]

Day 2 of the partition resizing. Still have over 20 hours remaining.

[moonman]

I had the same problem with my 2TB drive 2 years ago. My file server at the time was a P2-350MHz/640RAM running ClearOS (CentOS) and any writes loaded CPU to 100% so I switched to ext3 then ext4. I didn't even have 1TB drive at the time, but my 2TB was half full so ended up creating a second 1 TB partition in ext3, then copied everything from ntfs partition to ext partition, then deleted ntfs part. and resized the ext3 partition to the full size of the hdd. The whole process took about 3 days Fun times