Is cp the right command?

[pavNell]

Hello, I have two external firewire drives daisy-chained together. I'm trying to copy everything from one to the other. Here's the command I used,
cp -vR /mnt/firewire1/* /mnt/firewire2/

This seems to work but at a snails pace. I mean REALLY SLOW!! Perhaps there's a better way to copy large amount of files/directories in this manner? Thanks for any feedback.

M

 

[krale]

The best suggestion is to simply copy the files on your computer first, then back to device 2.

This isnt a limitation of Linux, or windows, or Mac, or whatever. You only have 400MBps of bandwidth on firewire. Since the client-server relationship has held on that standard, you have a computer (or a device known as server) do the transfers. Essentially, you're transffering 200MBps to your Computer, and 200MBps to the other device. Also the daisy chain causes colllisions in 1 segment, so 150MBps. Overhead reduces overall transfer too, drastically.

Here's a small script to automate what I suggest:

#! /bin/sh
mkdir /tmp/mp3temp
cp -vR /mnt/firewire1/* /tmp/mp3tmp
cp -vR tmp/mp3tmp /mnt/firewire2/
rm -rf /tmp/mp3tmp

Please let Tek-Tips members know if their posts were helpful.

 

[pavNell]

Thanks for the script krale. Just FYI, I plopped down $20 and bought another firewire card and all works well now and hardly a load on my CPU. I'm hardware ignorant and apperciate your feedback.