Momentus XT sshd slowness?

From	Peter Chant <pete@petezilla.co.uk>
Newsgroups	comp.os.linux.hardware
Subject	Momentus XT sshd slowness?
Date	2016-08-13 17:22 +0100
Message-ID	<e18vpiFth4oU1@mid.individual.net> (permalink)

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Hi all.

Running a laptop with a Seagate Momentus XT 1TB hard drive that is a
couple of years old (the drive, the laptop is probably somewhat older).
Using btrfs on top of luks.  Think-pad T400 with 8GB of ram so quite
elderly.

Booting up and initial loading of applications (Firefox, Thunderbird
etc) is very slow.  It might have got slower lately but I have no
subjective measurements.

Looking at atop the machine is IO bound.  The disk IO is maxed but the
the CPUs are definitely not.  I wonder whether btrfs on top of luks is
causing problems for the flash cache in the sshd drive, whether the has
run out of cache due to wear or whether I'm trying to do to much with it
(which I don't think would be the case).

As a quick test I put an old ssd in it using ext4, without luks.  It
went like a rocket.  However, it is not like for like and doing a like
for like test would be a fair amount of hassle.

I suspect I should just splash out on a ssd (the old one I have is too
small for what I want).  The ssd will be worth more than the rest of the
laptop, but if it is IO bound only, the rest of the machine is OK then
it seems a reasonable course of action.  If I update the laptop the ssd
could go into the newer machine so the ssd would not be wasted on an update.

It looks like I've come to a conclusion, get a ssd.  However, I wonder
if there are any other views or similar experiences out there?


Pete

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Thread

Momentus XT sshd slowness? Peter Chant <pete@petezilla.co.uk> - 2016-08-13 17:22 +0100
  Re: Momentus XT sshd slowness? "David W. Hodgins" <dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org> - 2016-08-14 05:21 -0400
    Re: Momentus XT sshd slowness? Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2016-08-14 10:38 +0100
    Re: Momentus XT sshd slowness? Peter Chant <pete@petezilla.co.uk> - 2016-08-14 13:25 +0100

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