[gentoo-user] Sata hard drive speed question

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Howdy,

I bought a 8TB hard drive.  Seagate 8TB 5E8 Exos ST8000AS0003 is the
exact model info.  It seems to be slow.  First, I had it hooked to a
adapter to a USB port.  I expected it to be a little slow but it gave me
memories of the old dial-up days.  When it shows KBs/second, it's
getting slow for a sata drive.  So, I moved it inside the case with a
sata connection directly to the mobo.  I unhooked my DVD burner for
this.  It's somewhat faster but still slow in my opinion.  I found this
for specs on a website.


Max. Sustained Transfer Rate OD (MB/s)
190MB/s


OK, can I get half that now?  One quarter would be better even.  This is
a sample of what I get when using --progress with rsync while copying
files from another drive to it, backup thing. 


102,782,342 100%    4.68MB/s    0:00:20 (xfr#122, ir-chk=1135/1995)

65,330,688 100%    5.34MB/s    0:00:11 (xfr#123, ir-chk=1134/1995)

59,338,843 100%    2.04MB/s    0:00:27 (xfr#124, ir-chk=1133/1995)

64,996,691 100%   10.99MB/s    0:00:05 (xfr#125, ir-chk=1132/1995)

467,837,625 100%    5.42MB/s    0:01:22 (xfr#126, ir-chk=1131/1995)

39,236,581 100%    5.42MB/s    0:00:06 (xfr#127, ir-chk=1130/1995)

302,340,815 100%    3.95MB/s    0:01:12 (xfr#128, ir-chk=1129/1995)



This is what I get from hdparm:


root@fireball / # hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   8222 MB in  2.00 seconds = 4114.05 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   2 MB in  3.59 seconds = 570.26 kB/sec
root@fireball / #


First one looks reasonable but second one just plain sucks.  Note the KB
instead of a MB.  I get this on a much older drive:


root@fireball / # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   8664 MB in  2.00 seconds = 4335.98 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 328 MB in  3.01 seconds = 108.82 MB/sec
root@fireball / #


And smartctrl gives me this on the new drive:


SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                              Remaining 
LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1    Extended offline    Self-test routine in progress  90%      
544         -
# 2    Short offline          Completed without error       00%      
543         -
# 3    Short offline          Completed without error       00%      
528         -


I've ran those tests in the past and it not affect the copy speed. 
Still, it shows the drive is OK.  I'm running the long one to be 100%
sure.  I was getting the same before I started the selftest tho.  I
created one large partition with gfdisk.  It is formatted with ext4 file
system.  Most files are videos but some are other file types and
smaller.  Thing is, it seems slow no matter what size the file is. 
Large files just take longer naturally.  This is what mount shows
including options.


/dev/sdb1 on /mnt/tmpdisk type ext4 (rw,relatime)


I have a few other drives on this system.  They work fine and perform
fine. Heck, a 6TB drive in a external enclosure connected by USB does
better than this.  Can someone explain why this drive is so terribly
slow?  Did I do something wrong?  Is there something special about a
drive this large that I need to do? 

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-)