2015 — 25 May: Monday
Yesterday's long-running file copy operation worked. Sort of. Providing by "worked" one is broad-minded enough to change one's definition of "file copy" operation to mean "file move" operation. That, at least, offers me a plausible explanation for the excruciatingly low data rates I was observing (as low as 2 MB/sec) from time to time. No matter. The same — by now dizzy — block of MP3s is being copied back even as I type. This time, however, the external 5TB USB3 drive is plumbed directly into the back of BlackBeast. None of this nonsense1 about directly connecting it to the Synology, no siree Bob.
And, yes, "copied" is the correct verb this time. The data rates are a much healthier 50 MB/sec or so this time, too, as I copy the files back from the external drive to the NAS.
It's a bit...
... sunnier this morning. It shows up the glorious array of 'stuff' now growing in the jungles that surround the house. (Some might call some of the major components "weeds" but I'm sticking with "flowers of unrecognised2 virtue".)
Breakfast, methinks.
Big surprise #1
A retired Air Chief Marshall (say what?) asserts that "it is an opportunity which any prime minister who aspires to be remembered as a statesman should take". How's that? Just agree to spend a minimum 2% of GDP on what's euphemistically known, these days, as "defence". (Link.)
Big surprise #2
Top economists (who all like to imagine they are a bit smarter than the average bear) disagree among themselves. (Link.) And bear grudges over a decade later. (Link.)
Small surprise #1
... by factoring in inflation and a metric for how much of their worth people are willing to spend ... the number of those who "could easily afford to pay $179 million for a Picasso has increased more than fourfold since the painting was last on the market" — in 1997. Ars longa vita brevis, and all that. (Link.)
Small surprise #2
There's also a huge amount of shame involved in being in debt or struggling, especially against the backdrop of assumption that privilege is somehow the result of a lifetime's sound financial decisions. (Link.)
My financial decisions have been largely uncharacterised by "soundness". But legacies from Christa and dear Mama are a different matter.
Having rejigged...
... my file-copying arrangements, first of all to get my CD rips safely back on to the NAS (from which, of course, they never should have been moved in the first place) and then to resume this mammoth file back-up operation, I'm pleased to see I'm getting file transfer speeds of over 90 MB/sec when reading from the NAS and copying over to my 5TB USB3 drive. Matters not that it's going up and down my local LAN and battering its way through the USB controller buried somewhere inside BlackBeast. That's a much more acceptable speed of transfer. It means the rest of this rather tedious backing-up should be over long before nightfall.
Lunch, methinks. All this data hefting is hungry work.
Mixed results
Turns out the file transfer speeds oscillate up and down, for no reason I can pinpoint. A data cache somewhere? A block size setting somewhere? Meanwhile, having reformatted the smaller 4TB external drive, I've reduced it to its horrible initial state: the one where only 'root' can write anything to the damn' thing. Not helpful. Another topic for tomorrow's lunch, alas.
It's jolly nearly tea-time. I'm also jolly near the end of the first chunk of that Stross trilogy. It's a good romp. Shades, indeed, of Zelazny's "Amber" series and H Beam Piper's "ParaTime" tales. No bad thing.
For my future reference... how to make the read-only drive a little more useful:
Mount drive cd to it sudo chmod 777 .
Worked beautifully. [Pause] And its high, sustained, data transfer rates lead me to conclude that something is horribly awry with its higher-capacity cousin. I shall return it, I suspect, to whence it came.