Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Peter Chant Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.hardware Subject: Momentus XT sshd slowness? Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2016 17:22:09 +0100 Lines: 32 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net sPK7bvcwGtKUKdhGwjFA3Ax9NqH0JtOy6pteSeiepZyFXg5Ik= Cancel-Lock: sha1:zz2SrVx+u26y5c3/gjpKWOyoUyI= X-Mozilla-News-Host: news://news.individual.net:119 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.2.0 Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.hardware:3178 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