Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Hard Disk Bottleneck

[Jim Perkins]

The fastest thing you can do is make a dedicated partition and read and 
write it directly.  This is very simple (open(), read(), write(), 
seek(), etc).  I typically dedicate the first 1024 blocks to storing 
info about the files.  I use one block per file and the first block 
stores info about the number of files stored.  Something like this:

block0000[0]=10  //10 files
block0001[0]=1024; //file 1 starts at block 1024
block0001[1]=1001023; //file 1 ends at block 1001023 (for a total of 512 
megabytes as each block is 512 bytes)

.....

block0010[0]=xxx //file 10 starts at block xxx
block0010[1]=xxx //file 10 ends at block xxx

This gives you a very fast simple sequential file system.

If you only need to use one file you could dd it to the partition.  In 
your code use open() to open the partition and read() the data.  If you 
want to test to see if a dedicated raw partition is going to be fast 
enough you can use dd with /dev/zero or /dev/null to test sequentially 
read and write speed.  You can vary the read/write size in dd to figure 
out the optimal read or write size.

-Jim