anilgurwara

If a file size increases in Linux/UNIX to say in GB's then will there be a decrease in write speed.
I mean will it take more time to write to a large file then to a small one??

Please clarify?

Thanks in advance

wmorri

Hi,

I would have to say no. If you set your burner to burn at 20x or 4x. It will burn at that speed for the entire time. This is reguardless of whether the file is 500mb or 5GB.

I hope this is what you were looking for.

Cheers!

anilgurwara

Thanks for your reply but for me write meant, writing on hard disk and not on CD Writer.
To append a 2 Gb file should take more time than 20kb file?
Suppose in an application that generates logs every now and then that need to be saved to a log file and that log file gets inflated to 2Gb, so does appending to 2Gb file will take more time that a 20kb file?
This is what I'm looking for.
Pls enlighten.

wmorri

You aren't describing yourself very well. The first sentence there, are we still talking about burning it to media? If so then the answer is yes, it would take longer, but that is just common sense.

The second sentence about the log file, I don't know how that fits. Do you want to burn the log file to media? The answer will still be the same yes it will take longer. Other than that I really don't have that much to go on.

Cheers!

Done_Fishin

very basically every time you want to write something to a file whether on a hard disk or a CD/DVD there will be a constant write speed when writing that data. In theory that write speed will comprise of read , write , verify commands which should not vary in speed once the write operation is put into practice. It is possible though that writing to a CD/DVD does not afll exactly under this protocol though since you cannot verify your CD/DVD data until such time as the session has been completed.

In practice though when writing large files to a disk, the Software will first have to locate some spare empty spaces to write to.
A small file may only require a single sector in order to take the whole file , depending upon your sector size and the method that was used to format the drive.

If you have a file that requires 512 bytes and your write speed is 512 bytes per second the you would expect it to take one second to written to your drive. Also if you had 512K bytes to be written then you would expect it to take 1000 seconds to write the file to your drive (please note that the numbers being shown here are imaginary & not actual expected write speeds)

However in practice there are finite unaccountable speeds that have to be taken into account. Data is not usually written in a single stream to the most easily accessible adjacent plots that are free. Hence the reason why defragmentation programs are used to "tidy up the drives".
The fact that information is written in a random process across the disk can actually cause files to be written at different speeds .. although the write speed doesn't change, the time it takes for the drive head to travel across the disk surface, verify location, write read and verify the written data, then shoot off to the opposite end of the drive to write the next piece of data will actually mean that the time required to write data to a drive will not be carried out in a linear fashion but will depend upon the number of times the head has to travel across the surface of the drive and the distance it travels in between every write operation. And of course this gets worse as the drive fills up since the drive will have to search longer to see where there are blanks in the File allocation table so that the data can be written.

hope this makes sense .. not sure if it applies to Linux so much since I believe the methods of writing data to a disk and using the File allocation tables is more organised than Non-Linux based software. However I could be wrong.