Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Jack wrote:
> On 8/25/22 08:52, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 8:43 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I've already got data on the drive now with the default settings so it
>>> is to late for the moment however, I expect to need to add drives
>>> later.  Keep in mind, I use LVM which means I grow file systems quite
>>> often by adding drives.  I don't know if that grows inodes or not.  I
>>> suspect it does somehow.
>> It does not.  It just means that if you want to reformat it you have
>> to reformat all the drives in the LVM logical volume.  :)
>
> As I remember, if you enlarge a logical volume by adding a new
> physical volume, you then have to expand the filesystem to use that
> additional space.  Looking at resize2fs, it does increase the number
> of inodes, but only linearly in proportion to the amount of increased
> size.  I don't see any way to tell it to decrease, or even just not
> increase, the number of inodes.
>
> Related question - how much space would you actually save by
> decreasing the number of inodes by 90%?  Enough for one or two more
> videos?
>
>
>


Now I have to admit, that is a question I have too.  That's why I was
wondering about tools that give info on inodes and such.  It could be it
just is not worth the effort to change the defaults.  Most videos are
either pushing 1GB or around 2GBs, depending on length of video.  If it
only saves a few 100MBs or even a few GBs, it won't really help much. 
The difference just isn't large enough.  If I was storing small files,
then it would but then I'd need those inodes as well.  Sort of a catch
22 there. 

At the moment, I just don't know enough about whether I should change
the defaults or not.  It's one of those, it's not really broke so it may
not need fixing. 

TLDR:  I will say this tho, I'm loving this fast internet even tho my
VPN seems to slow things down some.  Still, it is a LOT faster than DSL
by a huge margin.  Some things download so fast, if I blink, I miss it. 
When I do eix-sync, it is mostly processing things here with the CPU or
organizing files.  Downloading the files tends to be limited by the
server on the other end.  Downloading things like libreoffice, Firefox
etc takes seconds.  I use tail -f to watch it and it goes by really
fast.  My last update was quite large and I think it took less than 2
minutes. 

I'll be getting a new hard drive to add pretty soon.  :-D

While at it, can I move the drives on LVM to another system without
having to copy anything?  Just physically move the drives and LVM see
them correctly on the new system?  I may try to build a small computer
for a NAS soon.  I'm not sure what is the least I can buy that will
perform well.  I need to look into small mobos to see what options I
have.  I mostly need a CPU to handle moving files, memory to pass it
through and lots of SATA ports.  I figure a fast card for most SATA ports. 

Dale

:-)  :-)