This is a strange one: I have a friend who would like to build a
powerful box (maybe dual procs, lots of RAM, etc.) and be able to use
it to format maybe 6 hard drives at one time. He asked me if he could
do this with linux as the os and a script. He would want the drives to
be formatted simultaneously, not do one then the next, and so on.

I suggested that he might do better to buy one of those machines that
does nothing but format multiple hard drives, but since I'm always
telling him linux can do anything in the right hands, he wanted to know
if this could be done.

I don't even know if the normal ide bus would handle that kind of
traffic. What do you guys think?

Thanks,

Malke
--
"I have a cunning plan..."

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004 02:29:07 GMT, Malke staggered into the Black Sun and
said:
If he wants truly simultaneous operation on IDE disks, he's going to
need 6 IDE channels, because only one device on an IDE channel can be
active at a time. Most motherboards only have 2 IDE channels, so he'll
have to buy a couple of PCI IDE controller cards. Or he'll have to use
SCSI disks.

First, define precisely what he means by "format a drive". Partitioning
a disk can be done non-interactively with sfdisk--read the man page for
that tool; it's not exactly user-friendly. Making filesystems on a disk
is done with mke2fs/mkreiserfs/mkdosfs. Just partitioning and making a
filesystem doesn't consume much I/O or time at all. Checking a disk for
bad blocks using badblocks or mke2fs -c *does* take a lot of I/O.

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / Hire me!
-----------------------------/ http://crow202.dyndns.org/~mhgraham/resume

Malke <malke@nospoon.com> wrote:
Any motherboard and add-on cards, giving total of 6 IDE ports, will do.
You don't need dual-cpu or lots of ram.

To format,
man fdisk cfdisk sfdisk
To put filesystem,
man mkfs.*

--
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>
Linux solution for data management and processing.

Malke wrote:

But if he is building a powerful box, he should get all (or all but one,
say) Ultra/320 SCSI hard drives and stick them on a suitable SCSI
controller. He might want a motherboard with PCI-X slots, or an
integrated SCSI controller such as Adaptec's AIC-7902.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ Registered Machine 73926.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 1:35pm up 51 days, 56 min, 2 users, load average: 2.06, 2.15, 2.09

Jean-David Beyer wrote:

all the input.

Malke
--
"I have a cunning plan..."