HDD Speeds in Ubuntu on HP N40L

Caustic · 3 Jan 2013 at 21:26

Please help!

I have been setting up an Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS install on an HP N40L microserver. I have been rather underwhelmed with the transfer speeds of files, most notably, from one HDD to another. I seem to get around 12MB/s tops. This is with a mixture of drives, all internal with write caching on.

I tried a live version of 12.04 and 12.10 as well, and that was the same. Ideas? What can I try?

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Hades · 3 Jan 2013 at 22:42

Across gigabit ethernet from my widows machine to a samba share on my N40L running 8gb and Ubuntu server I get approx 108mbps. I'm afraid I can't suggest what to check though.

Caustic · 4 Jan 2013 at 08:22

This is the odd part. I noticed because my network transfer speeds were poor. Then I noticed that it seemed to be the HDD speed that was limiting it!

What version of Ubuntu server are you running? I have been trying quite a few but alas I am not a linux guru.

Audigex · 4 Jan 2013 at 09:23

What types of files are you copying? Lots of little files takes significantly longer than a few large files, for example.

What drives are they?

SMN · 4 Jan 2013 at 09:58

You using RAID at HW level?

Caustic · 4 Jan 2013 at 10:10

No RAID, just a collection of random drives. Mainly a 1TB and a 512GB. I doubt any are fast but still. I am copying a few large files at once, 4 files, each well over a gigabyte each.

However, I think I have solved it. Stupid me! They are NTFS. It seems to be only writing, but is there anything I can do? I know it is going to use more CPU time but I'm not worried about that.

SMN · 4 Jan 2013 at 11:43

Ah i see, is it using ntfs-3g to mount them? (I assume so).

You mention 512GB, did you mean 500GB, or are you running an SSD of some sorts? If your having performance issues writing to the SSD, it could be a number of things such as discard not being enabled and having issues finding empty sectors (might be getting confused here!).

Have you tried copying files to /home which should be an ext4 partition? If its fast copying to a linux partition, and slow to a Win one, then theres the answer.

Hades · 4 Jan 2013 at 12:44

Caustic said:
This is the odd part. I noticed because my network transfer speeds were poor. Then I noticed that it seemed to be the HDD speed that was limiting it!

What version of Ubuntu server are you running? I have been trying quite a few but alas I am not a linux guru.

I'm on 11.10.

Caustic · 4 Jan 2013 at 17:05

Ah, typo, I meant 500GB. I have been reading up on ntfs-3g. I did read about a few params that can be useful when mounting, but I'll have to do some more research.

I formatted one to ext4 and got 80MB/s. Now the question is, what can I do to get more speed from NTFS? After all, most people use NTFS formatted USB drives and mem sticks.

Any one got some clever ideas?

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aln · 4 Jan 2013 at 20:12

What drives you running? Should they be running 4k blocks? Were they?

Hades · 4 Jan 2013 at 21:32

Caustic said:
Ah, typo, I meant 500GB. I have been reading up on ntfs-3g. I did read about a few params that can be useful when mounting, but I'll have to do some more research.

I formatted one to ext4 and got 80MB/s. Now the question is, what can I do to get more speed from NTFS? After all, most people use NTFS formatted USB drives and mem sticks.

Any one got some clever ideas?

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Mine are using the default filesystem which is I assume ext4. Why do you want to use NTFS? I can understand wanting that filesystem for a USB stick that you would have to plug into a Windows machine but I'm assuming any file sharing on your box will take place over the network to a Samba share so you're better off keeping to a native Linux filesystem.

Caustic · 5 Jan 2013 at 14:51

None are new enough to require 4k blocks.

As I said, "most people use NTFS formatted USB drives and mem sticks". I'll use ext4 for the internal ones, but if I have to copy to a device at 10MBs all because I am using Linux, it just seems a shame. I did find that if I copy three files at the same time to an NTFS formatted HDD, each one gets 10MB/s! That means I am not CPU limited then!?!

I guess the server was cheap and the OS free so I can't complain too much.

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Hades · 6 Jan 2013 at 04:29

Googling this issue unfortunately shows that slow write speeds is not unusual on Linux when the filesystem is NTFS.

CaptainCrash · 6 Jan 2013 at 11:29

Caustic said:
As I said, "most people use NTFS formatted USB drives and mem sticks". I'll use ext4 for the internal ones, but if I have to copy to a device at 10MBs all because I am using Linux, it just seems a shame. I did find that if I copy three files at the same time to an NTFS formatted HDD, each one gets 10MB/s! That means I am not CPU limited then!?!

I'm probably missing the point, but why wouldn't you just plug your portable devices into your Windows client PC and copy the files straight to/from a Samba share or whatever?

It seems a bit of an odd complaint to me, particularly given that NTFS is a proprietary filesystem which isn't supported natively by Linux (try using Windows to copy between ext4-formatted volumes).

Caustic · 6 Jan 2013 at 13:37

CaptainCrash said:
I'm probably missing the point, but why wouldn't you just plug your portable devices into your Windows client PC and copy the files straight to/from a Samba share or whatever?

It seems a bit of an odd complaint to me, particularly given that NTFS is a proprietary filesystem which isn't supported natively by Linux (try using Windows to copy between ext4-formatted volumes).

Because my windows machine is a connected to the rest of my network via a slow homeplug. It is also not left on, in the bedroom, a power hungry gaming system etc.

I get that NTFS is proprietory. Accessing EXT4 on windows requires extra software that is probably even slower. But still, that doesn't change the fact that NTFS is very common and slow on Linux. And there doesn't seem to be much I can do about it.

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