Distro with fastest Disk Access = ?

FatRakoon · 25 Dec 2018 at 04:39

I have noticed that the disk access of my Linux PCs are many times slower than it is with Windows.

I have done this with a number of distros and a number of PCs.

Right now, my fastest Linux PC is a Z270 Board with a 6600K CPU and 2x8GB Dominator and a 660Ti Card.

I am currently, on that PC running MINT CINNAMON 19, although its had half a dozen distros in the last few days, and when you read this, its probably changed.

The root and SWAP are on a 240GB SSD and /home is on a 3TB WD Black, so the disk should be nippy enough, but it is simply not.
I have a third HD that is mounted as /home/steam and I use this as my steam games folder. This is also a WD Black but a 2TB one.

So, what distro is the fastest for accessing disks? I would have thought that they are all going to be roughly on par, however, after tryign a few out, this is clearly not the case as some as horrifically slow.

Rroff · 25 Dec 2018 at 05:59

Debian was the all around best last I tested - some other distros are faster at specific things but overall for disc performance and features Debian rounded out better than anything else.

Hades · 25 Dec 2018 at 09:31

I would have guessed that the filesystem type would make more difference than the distro. E.g. whether it's FAT, EXT4, Reiser, etc.

Ice Tea · 25 Dec 2018 at 10:49

Almost an impossible question to answer as Phoronix Linux has pointed out many times that a simple kernel update can change his disk benchmarking of a distro as they are constantly tweaking and changing the settings and it's currently all over the place with all the Spectre , Meltdown patching between updates and releases.

For example Linus Torvalds was recently unhappy with a patch being enabled by default as some people would have seen a 50% reduction in speed so that had to be changed to allow an applications to decide if to use the patch rather than it being enabled system wide.

When you try Distros on your PC you need to check for updates so you have all the latest kernel patches.

FatRakoon · 25 Dec 2018 at 14:21

Rroff said:
Debian was the all around best last I tested - some other distros are faster at specific things but overall for disc performance and features Debian rounded out better than anything else.

I have played with Debian 9.3 however, I found it to be lacking in some things that I take for granted with mint or ubuntu, I also found it struggling when I wanted to get better gaming support too!

Hades said:
I would have guessed that the filesystem type would make more difference than the distro. E.g. whether it's FAT, EXT4, Reiser, etc.

So would I, however, on the PCs I tried things with, the distro made a bigger difference than you would have thought. For example, when I went with a spin of FEDORA with CINNAMON Desktop ( Im liking Cinnamon a lot recently ) and even when starting up and quitting from a steam game, the icons took about 2 seconds to display, and oyu could almost see them being drawn one by one... This was how much FEDORA was struggling... It was a similar thing when running a steam game... Its awful enough having to wait about 10 times longer than windows for SoulStorm to load up in Mint or Ubuntu, but with Fedora, I thought it hung... I went to make a brew and it was still not loaded up when I got back. I dug out my ubuntu Flash disk and I was right about to press reset when teh screen went black... I waited again and the game finally came up, but loading up the game simply took so long I knew that I was simply not willing to wait this long every time I played the game, so Fedora was off the list.

I had similar results with ROSA and also CENTOS when I finally managed to get that on!

Ice Tea said:
Almost an impossible question to answer as Phoronix Linux has pointed out many times that a simple kernel update can change his disk benchmarking of a distro as they are constantly tweaking and changing the settings and it's currently all over the place with all the Spectre , Meltdown patching between updates and releases.

For example Linus Torvalds was recently unhappy with a patch being enabled by default as some people would have seen a 50% reduction in speed so that had to be changed to allow an applications to decide if to use the patch rather than it being enabled system wide.

When you try Distros on your PC you need to check for updates so you have all the latest kernel patches.

Yes, thats all true, with updates etc, and yes, I do have all the latest patches and updates before I give it any actual testing... Annoying cos it can take a while.

Dru · 26 Dec 2018 at 18:18

Maybe try using some of the different io schedulers the kernel makes available? There are a number of them (some trade off throughput for latency or vice versa) but some of them work better than others for ssd's and mechanical drives and some distro's use the same scheduler for all drives regardless of the type of drive being used (which isn't ideal).

There are commands for checking the current io scheduler being used per storage device and some other optimisations on this arch wiki page. I found this helped a bit with slow access on my mechanical drive a year or so ago as it turned out it was using a scheduler that performed better on an ssd.

FatRakoon · 28 Dec 2018 at 08:51

Ok, I will check that out and thanks for the link.

Im remembering back to the days when I first tried to get into Linux, and using HDPARM on the AMD 450 and it made such a huge improvement in Disk access.

Anywaqy, Im waffling a little, so I will stop myself before I go OTT.

Ice Tea · 28 Dec 2018 at 09:08

Don't know if you're testing any of these Distro's in VirtualBox but some of them run really crap as they are not optimised for VM?

Just a thought.

FatRakoon · 28 Dec 2018 at 22:27

I do use Virtual Machines, but testing for disk access can only truly be done on the actual machines rather than in a VM.

I have huge issues with getting Sabayon to run well for me, as it was my favourite distro, but I have had issues for a while now, and even in a VM, it fails in the exact same way as it fails on a real Machine and as I have tried various versions from various sources, using various ways to get it to install on various machine,s virtual and real and they all fail in the same way ( Works great until it updates - then it wont boot ) I have come to the conclusion, that Sabayon does not work anymore and that the entire world is lying to me about it...

But no, its hard to check the speeds of disk access.

One of the better distros for speed is Q4OS and I also am growing to like Peppermint... Thats pretty quick and ubuntu based... I have installed that and then added Cinnamon.

Ice Tea · 29 Dec 2018 at 08:09

1) Ubuntu 18.10

2) Official Gnome Firefox shell addon for easy one click install.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/gnome-shell-integration/

3) Dash to Panel to give you a classic bottom taskbar.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

Then in dash-to-panel options enable desktop button , then enable ungroup applications (and then in the ungroup applications options cog) enable use the favourite applications icons as launchers to give you the classic microsoft windows launch icons on the left of the taskbar.

4) I'm happy with the above but if you wanted it to look even more like Cinnamon you can add the Arc Menu.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1228/arc-menu/

I've pretty much found everything else to be a pointless waste of time as either you waste your life fighting with an Arch update when it's destroys everything and all the other Debian distros like Mint/PepperMint are just a pointless bastardization of the above Debian/Ubuntu.

The only other 2 disto's i might have a play with in the future is Void Linux and Intel's Clear Linux as they are currently getting great reviews but if like me you have Family members sharing the PC then Ubuntu will stay as it's all easy point and click for them.

Tom B · 7 Jan 2019 at 21:39

Can you provide some actual numbers, windows and Linux? How are you benchmarking the speeds and what makes you think they're slow?

If you're using hdparm, the -t switch and -T switch give vastly different results:

Code:

# hdparm -t /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 6370 MB in  3.00 seconds = 2123.32 MB/sec

# hdparm -T /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing cached reads:   19000 MB in  1.98 seconds = 9610.33 MB/sec

Also, can you post your /etc/fstab mount options such as noatime or relatime can make a big difference.

What filesystem is it? If it's ntfs, make sure you're not mounting it with the sync option.