Journal Suggestions

[Mikus Grinbergs]

> The SD card
> is deliberately made difficult to remove.  If someone buys and installs
> an SD card perhaps it should be considered a part of the Journal
> itself.  More like buying a second hard drive for your system than
> plugging in something removeable.  So now I have just one Journal with
> 2.5 gigs free instead of 500 megs free.  That's the way I was hoping to
> use the SD card when I got it.

I have a significant problem with the <lack of> speed of the OLPC. 
Even on NAND, if I (manually, in Terminal) copy a 5 MB file from one 
place to another, it takes seconds and seconds (as opposed to a 
desktop, where such a transfer happens in the blink of an eye).

I have not tried any measurements, but my concern is that with an 
external device (*particularly* an SD card), access is even slower 
than with NAND.  [And SD cards come in several speed ranges - the 
cheapest are usually the slowest).  Empirically, I haven't noticed 
'olpc-update' being significantly faster from an USB stick than over 
the internet.


What raises my concern about treating an SD card as an extension of 
the Journal is - how fast will the XO be once there are a great many 
items for it to keep track of?

I don't use 'suspend';  but the few times I've tried it - typically 
when attempting 'resume', my "Power" light stays on for more than 
three seconds, then goes back to blinking (in other words, the 
"un-suspend" times out).  I suspect some of those seconds are being 
spent accessing the 100 or so files on my SD card.  [Would be nice 
if the OLPC had a 'Storage Device Busy' light for me to look at.] 
What will be the performance of the OLPC (including:  how long will 
it take to boot?) when I have several thousand files on my SD card?

mikus