Kubuntu 21.10 lagging with Multiple Hard Drives

[Serenova]

Hey there!

So... I've got a kinda insane laptop. It has 3 hard drives. 1 for Windows (need proprietary software for work, so I gotta keep it around), 1 that I'm using for Linux, and 1 that I'm calling "OS Agnostic Storage" that's accessable from both OS's.

My issue is tthe following:
When I have the windows drive and the storage drive installed and readable, my system lags to high heaven. Like.... typing delay in the terminal level of lag. Countable seconds when opening a program lag. When hovering over the the program menu's category lag. And I have NO idea why.

Yet when I've disconnected the Windows drive and the storage drive, it runs fast and super responsive! No noticable lag whatsoever!

I'm honestly stumped about what's going on here.

I'm not a programmer. I have very little experience with coding, programming or anything else to be honest. I'm rrying to switch to Linux for everything excpet the proprietary software I need for my job. So having lag like this is completely insane. Especially because it's not even on the same hard drive as Windows.

System specs:
Omen by HP, model 17t
CPU: Intel i9 @ 2.30GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Mobile (yes I know that Nvidia apparenlty doesn't play nice with Linux - I didn't know that in 2020 when I bought this machine)
RAM: 32GB
Hard Drives:

• Win10: Crucial P5 Plus 2TB PCIe M.2 2280SS SSD
• Kubuntu: Crucial P5 Plus 2TB PCIe M.2 2280SS SSD
• OS Agnostic storage: Crucial MX500 4TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 inch 7mm

Kubuntu version 21.20
KDE Plasma version 5.22.5
KDE Frameworks Version 5.86.0
Qt Version 5.15.2
Kernel Version 5.13.0.22-generic
Graphics Platform X11

[Snowhog]

Why do you have the Windows drive "installed and readable" (mounted) when booted to Kubuntu? There should be nothing on it that you need while in Kubuntu. I'm going to guess that the lag you are experiencing is due to file indexing operations that are trying to deal with the Windows drive.

[Serenova]

Why do you have the Windows drive "installed and readable" (mounted) when booted to Kubuntu? There should be nothing on it that you need while in Kubuntu. I'm going to guess that the lag you are experiencing is due to file indexing operations that are trying to deal with the Windows drive.

I guess i wasn't clear because I'm still new to Linux and the vocab used.

The 4TB ssd I want to be visibible to both OS's when using my computer. I'm using that for storage.

What I mean by the Win10 drive mounted was it's physically connected inside my computer.

I have NEITHER the storage drive or the Win10 drive set to mount automatically at boot.

[oshunluvr]

I have NEITHER the storage drive or the Win10 drive set to mount automatically at boot.

Ok, so how are you accessing them after boot? More importantly, are they listed in fstab or are you just clicking on them in Dolphin. If you're not using fstab, you can't set the best options for the file systems. Still, even with that you shouldn't be seeing that much lag.

Try opening Konsole and running iotop (you'll probably need to install it.) and see what - if anything - is accessing the drives.

Frankly, it's hard to imagine what would cause this. File systems aren't magically randomly accessed, only when needed. I suggest either turning off file indexing or let it do it's thing for a long time to build the full index.

[Serenova]

I don't have trouble accessing files on either drive.

The lagging issue is the GUI itself. Even if I haven't mounted the drives I'm getting GUI lag.

I reached out to a friend who daily drives Linux to see if he could help me as well. We changed my compositor settintgs from the default in Kubuntu to the following:

• Rendering backend: OpenGL 3.1
• unchecked "Allow applications to block compositing"

That seems to have solved the lag issues.

I was mentioning the hard drives above because when I physically disconneted them I was getting less lag in the system, but not a complete reduction of lag.

We also switched me to a different Nvidia driver which also seems to have helped (but borked my interface scalling until we fixed the xconfig settings).

I've seen a decent reduction in the lag issues at this point. If the issue crops up again I will defintiely try new things. For some reason I'm always the one geting totally random issues that no one has seen before. Just my luck I guess!

[claydoh]

Another reason I am glad I ditched Nvidia,.
I am afraid that when GPU prices finally fall to reasonable levels, I still will only be able to afford upgrading my RX 480 to a 2060 or something lol.

Odd that the lag was present with multiple drives mounted.
Otherwise, I would have first asked about your driver version.

[Serenova]

I didn't know back in May 2020 that I'd be running linux on this machine. Or I'd have made some different setup choices when I ordered my laptop!

[claydoh]

It is sort of hard to NOT have Nvidia, on a laptop with any graphical oomph, so yeah.
I would have imagined things would be a bit more improved since I switched a few years back, especially with a popular and now less-new card like the 2060.
But cruising through different fora and subreddits, it seems it is still finicky sometimes.

Having said that, waaaayyyy back in the day, when it was Ati, there was zero support for this brand, and the then-proprietary drivers had to be installed from the terminal, and without the desktop loaded , and there were no free drivers for them.
I had to get an Nvidia Riva-something because it was such a pita to set up the Ati.