Arch Linux

aditya3098

Member

From: In front of the computer

Registered: 2014-05-01

Posts: 53

Website

Very low hdd read speeds

I have a seagate baracuda 500gb hdd@7200rpm
I had an issue where all programs take a few seconds longer to start after a fresh boot. My awesome wm took up to 5s longer (its almost instant after the first time).
I read the wiki article, and here is the hdd test:

aditya@aditya-desktop ( ~ )>> sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 412 MB in  3.01 seconds = 136.86 MB/sec

Is this a harddisk error(hardware), or is it fixable?

Ekkoria

Member

From: Florida

Registered: 2014-05-25

Posts: 20

Re: Very low hdd read speeds

What you're seeing is normal behavior. After awesome is loaded into RAM the first time you open it, it doesn't need to be read from disk anymore because it's already in RAM, so opening it again is much faster. 136 MB/s is actually pretty good performance.

Stebalien

Member

Registered: 2010-04-27

Posts: 1,239

Website

Re: Very low hdd read speeds

You could try using e4rat. Your hard drive advertises a higher throughput than what you're seeing because the advertised throughput is the highest throughput possible, likely sequential reads along the outer-edge of the disk. E4rat tries to take advantage of this by optimizing the on-disk data layout and prefetching.

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Steven [ web : git ]
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