Re: removing an ext2fs file forces disk activity

[Neal H Walfield]

> This is on my good old Sparc station 4, a reasonably modern (low-end,
> less than two years old) IBM scsi disk, and linux-2.2.19. I'd expect
> more idle cycles on a modern machine and decent disk hardware, but I
> don't have any around.

You need to consider the correlation between the cpu speed, the disk
speed and the controller type.  If the disk controller on the sparc is
a really slow SCSI card, then the kernel will have offloaded some cpu
operations at the cost of waiting longer for the operation to
complete.  Compare this to a newer system that uses the more cpu
intensive IDE controller which, once set in motion, writes much
faster.

You are really comparing apples and avocados.