[LAU] External USB 2 HD for real-time recording

[Peder Hedlund]

Quoting Len Ovens <len at ovenwerks.net>:

The previous reply was due to a trigger happy Send finger, sorry about that...

>> An obvious workaround would be having a cron job doing a 'touch
>> TempFile' or something similar on the disk once every 5 minutes or so.
>
> Would that actually touch the disk or just the copy of the temp file in
> the ram buffers?

Initially it would only hit the cache but I think it's be written to  
disk within the remaining five minutes.
You could issue a 'sync' but I'm not sure a forced sync during, say, a  
recording would be the proper thing to do, since it syncs all cached  
data on all disks.

Another option would be to do a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=TestFile bs=1k  
count=1 conv=fdatasync' to make sure the data gets written to disk  
immediately (http://romanrm.ru/en/dd-benchmark).

- Peder