Write disk image to multiple drives 526

Grant

That works as well. Though an additional benefit of using Frisbee is that it only writes allocated sectors to the card; the filesystem uses only about half of the available space on the card, so the time savings there are significant. (Especially since CF isn't all that fast at writing.) Also, the eventual end-users of the system aren't that bright; they might stick an blank in the source slot...

Our primary writer station is using 16 writers; 8 per bank. Each bank is connected to a separate root hub on the host system. Each bank consists of 8 writers, a 7 port hub and a 4 port hub. 6 writers are connected to the 7 port hub along with the 4 port hub; the remaining two writers are connected to the 4 port. I just finished buttembling the system the other day and haven't had a chance to test it with 16 cards, but the prototype system (4 writers on a single hub) showed little difference between writing a single card and writing 4 cards; USB2 is much faster than the maximum write speed of the cards. I suspect writing 8 cards on one channel will be a bit slower, but still much faster than writing them sequentially.

if they've been previously formatted (also breaks automouting of CDs, floppies and memory sticks, but it's a dedicated machine and I don't much care...I found a sample .fdi file in the docs folder that disables mounting of hotplugged block devices) and hacked the script to filter parbreastion devices. (parbreastion block devices are subfolders of their parent device in sysfs; they don't have their own folder insys-block. Adding the following in my loop works.

-dsys-block-$device continue

Of course, if anyone knows a cleaner solution (e.g. preventing udev from creating the symlinks to the parbreastion nodes in the first place and-or stopping the kernel from reading the parbreastion table and generating hotplug events for the parbreastions) I'm all ears.

Cheers,

-- Phil