Second hard drive, very slow write.

[dibl]

In BIOS, what is the SATA mode set to? It should be AHCI for optimal performance of the hdd, although the SSD might or might not perform optimally in AHCI mode.

[Jeremy_Ray]

One other thing to try: do a copy (of a single large file) using rsync with the --progress parameter. Does the transfer speed stay fairly constant or does it oscillate between fast and slow? (I get about 22-25MB/s fairly steady, although on previous installations I've often had problems with transfers starting fast and then slowing to less than 3MB/s - and sometimes speeding up again randomly.)

rsync copies a 72 meg file in 14 seconds at a steady 4.9-5 mb/sec.

cp copies the same file in one minute 54 seconds

You might want to install smartmontools and run sudo smartctl -i /dev/sdb (or whatever the terabyte drive is).

The output is -

smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.0.0-12-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: ST31000524AS
Serial Number: 6VPGWCVQ
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 045db54f7
Firmware Version: JC4B
User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 4
Local Time is: Sat Mar 3 15:53:02 2012 EST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

16GB? I'm not speaking to you any more :mad:

It's only $60 for 2 4 gig sticks. Right now there's a $10 rebate - Link You can get it for $50.

I'm a struggling artist, I only have 16 gigs because I think I'm going to need it. My previous computer had 4 gigs and Blender could use all of it.

In BIOS, what is the SATA mode set to? It should be AHCI for optimal performance of the hdd, although the SSD might or might not perform optimally in AHCI mode.

I went into the BIOS and changed everything IDE to AHCI. It didn't help.

[Jeremy_Ray]

Hmm, I just copied 200+ megs to the SSD from a flashdrive plugged in to a USB 2.0 port - took 5-6 seconds. The 14 second rsync transfer doesn't look so good now.

[SecretCode]

Yes, those write speeds are still no good. If you can't beat 30 seconds for a 700MB ISO file then you are not doing as well as my USB-attached mechanical drives - and a SATA-attached drive should be better.

I find it odd that rsync should do better than cp (for a local, fresh copy ... its algorithms should yield improvements for updates where only part of the file has changed or across networks). But I don't know what it implies.

Since smartctl works you might want to go into the diagnostic details. But I haven't done this with the command-line interface ... and the man page is peppered with EXTREMELY DANGEROUS DO NOT TRY THIS warnings for a few of the parameters, so you definitely need to be cautious. I've only seriously used it via the Palimpsest GUI tool ... which you can install as "gnome-disk-utility" - I don't know if there is a KDE equivalent.

Out of interest did you try copying when booted in text mode?

[Jeremy_Ray]

Out of interest did you try copying when booted in text mode?

How? This thing boots so fast, I never see GRUB.

[SecretCode]

The GRUB menu is probably hidden - press shift before the boot starts (press and hold when you see the BIOS screen, I think) - that should cause it to appear

The length of time the GRUB menu shows shouldn't be affected by how fast the boot is

[Jeremy_Ray]

The GRUB menu is probably hidden - press shift before the boot starts (press and hold when you see the BIOS screen, I think) - that should cause it to appear

The length of time the GRUB menu shows shouldn't be affected by how fast the boot is

Will look at it tomorrow. I found this a moment ago - Link

Check in device manager under the drive controllers and make sure the SATA connections are not running in PIO mode, if they are set for IDE emulation.
If it's in IDE mode make sure its set to DMA 5 or DMA 6.

Of course the advice is for Windows, what's the Kubuntu equivalent?

[Jeremy_Ray]

Shift brought grub up. By text mode, do you mean recovery mode? I ran recover mode and it showed a bunch of text as things booted up. After a while it wasn't doing anything, so I hit enter and got a command prompt. I was able to change directories, but not access files, I assume because I was not logged in.

[SecretCode]

In recovery mode you should be able to access files and you should be able to see your 2nd drive and run a copy ... just be aware that you're logged in as root. The prompt string should be a '#'. Check what directory you're in using pwd - I think it's either / or /root. Anyway, run a file copy using e.g.

rsync --progress /path/to/large/file /seconddrive/file

Not sure about the PIO mode question.

[Jeremy_Ray]

In recovery mode you should be able to access files and you should be able to see your 2nd drive and run a copy ... just be aware that you're logged in as root. The prompt string should be a '#'. Check what directory you're in using pwd - I think it's either / or /root. Anyway, run a file copy using e.g.

rsync --progress /path/to/large/file /seconddrive/file

Not sure about the PIO mode question.

How come the contents of my directories don't display in recovery mode?

[SecretCode]

In what way don't they display - no results to an ls command? Or directory not found? Or what? Check an ls command with explicit directory, like ls -la /.

Your user files will not be accessible if you have encrypted your home folder, that's the only thing I can think of.

[Jeremy_Ray]

LS shows nothing. I didn't use encryption.

My user directory isn't showing up in home either. Also, rsync is unknown in this mode. So basically nothing worked Well, cp was going to work, if recovery mode could have found the directories.

[SecretCode]

I'm puzzled. Are you booting using the "(recovery mode") menu entry in GRUB? Do you get a text screen "Recovery Menu" and do you select the last item "root - Drop to a root shell prompt"? Do you then get a prompt ending in a #? And does pwd return /root?

In this environment I can cd to my home dir, ls my files, use cp and rsync. I don't have a second internal drive to see if it's automatically mounted through fstab; it might not be. But all the regular command line commands should work as normal. (Remembering that this is a real root shell and you can break things!)

Of course, this is only to see if there is any difference in the write speed, and there might not be. But if there is, it would indicate a problem with a background process or GUI app and not with the drive settings.

[Jeremy_Ray]

I'm puzzled. Are you booting using the "(recovery mode") menu entry in GRUB?

Yes.

Do you get a text screen "Recovery Menu" and do you select the last item "root - Drop to a root shell prompt"? Do you then get a prompt ending in a #?

That I don't get. I select "recover mode," and I get a bunch of boot-oriented text scrolling over my screen, and finally a blank line without a command prompt.

And does pwd return /root?

Yes, it does return /root.

[SecretCode]

If you

pwd
cd /home/yourname
pwd
ls -l

what is the output? "Total 0" or blank?