EXT3 Performance

[tobyheywood]

Hi,

I recently bought a Samsung X11 Laptop, with 80GB SATA HD (5400RPM), 1GB RAM and install Slackware Linux 11.0

I found that formating the main partition took approximately an hour (it's a 60GB primary partition). After a X number of mounts, fsch kicks in automatically and proceeds to take approximately 30 - 40 minutes to perform a complete fsck.

On different hardware this process would take probably no more than 5 - 10 minutes to complete.

I think the primary cause of this slow fsck and general slow running of the laptop might be cause by the hard drive.

Is there anything I can do to improve overall performance with the existing hardware or would I be better off getting a new faster hard disk?

Thanks for any input.

Regards

Toby Heywood

http://www.tobyheywood.co.uk/

 

[thedaver]

A 5400 rpm HDD is pretty slow these days, so any solution would give a perception of slowness on that hardware.

'hdparm' is the tool used to optimize your system's interaction with the HDD

I have NOT tried to use hdparm on a SATA drive, so I am not sure whether hdparm remains relevant for that technology.

Any page you lookup that describes hdparm should include a stern warning that you can really screw up your use of the HDD if you don't know what you're doing.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[tobyheywood]

Thanks for the response.

So far everything I've found suggests that hdparm will not work with SATA disks.


Toby Heywood

http://www.tobyheywood.co.uk/

 

[stefanwagner]

Ooouh - 30 mins fsck? 1 h formatting?

I don't know how many rpm my drive performs, but it's a
description: ATA Disk
product: IC25N080ATMR04-0
vendor: Hitachi
74 GB
- not really fast - 20 MB uncached reads /s.

But formatting reiserfs took less than a minute, fsck - what was that again?

don't visit my homepage:

http://home.arcor.de/hirnstrom/bewerbung

 

[Kozusnik]

I'd turn it off...

http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/ext3/ext3-usage.html

tune2fs -i 0 -c 0 /dev/hdxx

But that's just me.

Mark

 

[tobyheywood]

Can anyone remember the last time they formatted a laptp HD with ext3, and if you can what size was it and how lng did it take?

The reason for persisting with the questions is simple. If format speed is indicative of overall performance of the disk then I need a different HD. I also eperience sloness instarting apps such as Mozilla, Firefox, OpenOffice and KDE takes more time than my desktop machine of similar spec admittedly with a high rpm HD.

Cheers

Toby

Toby Heywood

http://www.tobyheywood.co.uk/

 

[thedaver]

Toby I think you already have your answer don't you? 5400 is too slow for your own needs. EXT3 also adds the impact of a journaling file system - which CAN slow down perceived performance as well.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[tobyheywood]

Finally got to the bottom of this one, with out the expense of purchasing a new hard drive.

The issue was caused by the linux kernel choosing to use IDE drivers for my SATA drive rather than SCSI. After forcing the kernel to use only SCSI drivers I was able to transfer 20GB across a gigabit network connection in a little over 12 minutes as opposed to the previous attempt which was almost 4 hours.

Anyway hope someone else finds this useful.

Cheers

Toby Heywood

http://www.tobyheywood.co.uk/