I’ve just replaced my SATA boot drive /dev/sda1 with a 65Gb SSD (Kingston SSDnow V-100, latest version) but I find the much-hyped speed advantage almost negligible. I used to have boot times in openSUSE (fresh install of 11.4, measuring from GRUB menu to startup guitar chord) of around 50 seconds, and the SSD drive is only a little faster at about 40 seconds. I was expecting something more like half the previous boot speed…
Haven’t done any tinkering yet except for the noatime setting in /etc/fstab. Any suggestions?
As you do not explain what is on that partition (of which you only tell it is seen as */sdev/sda1 *by your system.) nobody can tell anything with certainty. Is it used at all by your openSUSE system? Is it used for Swap? Is it used for your root file system? Is it used for your /home file system?
I think you’ll find answers to most of your questions in the first sentence of my original message 
And no, no /home or anything else, just / and Grub’s there too.
Done a bit more tweaking following the various tips (tmp to ramdisk, noop, discard) but no improvement at all. Still only 10-15 seconds improvement on HD boot. Here’s my fstab in casethere’s any clues:
/dev/sda1 / ext4 defaults,noatime,discard,errors=remount-ro,acl,user_xattr 0 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_S0MUJ1PP443333-part2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_S0MUJ1PP443333-part3 /home ext4 defaults 1 2
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
(Edited to put fstab into code tags for clarity).
I think you’ll find answers to most of your questions in the first sentence of my original message And no, no /home or anything else, just / and Grub’s there too.
Done a bit more tweaking following the various tips (tmp to ramdisk, noop, discard) but no improvement at all. Still only 10-15 seconds improvement on HD boot. Here’s my fstab in casethere’s any clues:
/dev/sda1 / ext4 defaults,noatime,discard,errors=remount-ro,acl,user_xattr 0 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_S0MUJ1PP443333-part2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_S0MUJ1PP443333-part3 /home ext4 defaults 1 2
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
I’ve just replaced my SATA boot drive /dev/sda1 with a 65Gb SSD (Kingston SSDnow V-100, latest version) but I find the much-hyped speed advantage almost negligible.
There is nothing IMHO that says what your use of that partition is. I can see that in the old situation there was a boot record on the SATA disk (outside the partitions) and that you had at least one partition on that disk (#1) and that you propbably had set the BIOS to boot from it. Which would suggest that at least a */boot *directory would be on that partition. To assume more would be speculation, which is an almost certain way to have big misunderstandings between you and those who want to help you.
In any case your fstab listing explains a lot. An *fdisk -l *would more or less complete the picture.
Here’s the output of fdisk -l:
Disk /dev/sda: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders, total 125045424 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000123a3
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 125044735 62521344 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x634d0175
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 83892223 41945088 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 83892224 92276735 4192256 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb3 92276736 976773119 442248192 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000c5ae1
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 63 41945714 20972826 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 41945715 1048578614 503316450 83 Linux
/dev/sdc3 1048578615 1953520064 452470725 83 Linux
A lot of the boot process is spent waiting for things to happen, e.g. BIOS waiting for self-test to finish, DHCP client daemon waiting for an IP address lease. Thus the speed of the SSD doesn’t shine through during boot. It’s only file ops in normal operation that the I/O speed of the SSD is advantageous.
You might want to run bootchart to see where the waits are.
And also including one complete login may spoil the view. The boot does only use your / file system of course, but loging in by a user generates a lot of I/O inside /home (depends of course on which desktop, what to start/restart and all sorts of personal preferences of that user).
Yes, I understand that, which is why I measure from the grub menu to the desktop to eliminate the BIOS stuff. No DHCP because fixed IP address. Will try bootchart - thanks for the suggestion, only installed the SSD yesterday so hadn’t thought of that yet.
This also occurred to me, in fact I was toying with the idea of placing /home on the SSD too, but only the configuration stuff (i.e. the hidden .folders) and move everything else to a HDD partition mounted as /data or something. I dropped that idea because I wasn’t sure how much difference it would make: maybe I’ll reconsider that.
On 06/05/2011 01:36 PM, hcvv wrote:
>
> And also including one complete login may spoil the view. The boot does
> only use your -/ -file system of course, but loging in by a user
> generates a lot of I/O inside- /home- (depends of course on which
> desktop, what to start/restart and all sorts of personal preferences of
> that user).
good thought! maybe for max speed boot it would be best to move all
actual data (mail, music, video, etc etc etc) to a different partition
on SATA (linked to in (say) /home/[you]/Download etc) and keep all the
~/.[hidden] config files/directories–then put config file rich /home
also on the SSD… ??
NOTE–i don’t actually know what i’m talking about, so backup AND read
my caveat before experimenting with real data
oh, and i bet someone else has already done the thinking and trying on
this… http://www.google.com/search?q=linux+ssd+boot+performance
–
dd CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
via NNTP openSUSE 11.4 [2.6.37.6-0.5] + KDE 4.6.0 + Thunderbird 3.1.10
Acer Aspire One D255, 1.66 GHz Atom, 1 GB RAM, Intel Pineview graphics
- When your gecko is broken you have a reptile dysfunction! *
What I intended to say was that measuring boot time has to stop when the login screen is there.
Of course you may measure anything you think worthwhile, but adding login time to the boot time and calling the total “boot time” is not making it precise for the audience (and maybe for yourself).
I personaly wouln’t go for having the files/directories where the names start with a dot and are in a home directory in a different file system form the rest of the files/directories in that home directory. The only more or less “automatic” way to do this is creating a /home/<user>/data or so directory on another file system and having all the"spontanious" created data (which will include those that start with a dot I guess) go automaticaly in /home/<user> and the ones the user creates all by himself, go, by (s)he saying so into that /home/<user>/data. You then can have that /home/<user>/data on a different file system and then either mount that (when it contains only the data of one particular user) or symlink to it (easier when you have to accomodate more users with this apporoach. It then completely depends on the diciplin shown by the user(s) how it works out).
But this contradicts the normal setup for a desktop user, where there are a lot of directories like Documents, Music, you name it, and thus you either must completely ignore this default lay-out, or you must symlink them all.
IMHO this would create a mess I wouldn’t like to have on a system managed by me.
And I have one other thing, completely off Topic.
Now that the Forums have converted to UTF-8 for new things, but not for the old ones, you may want to redo your name Günter in your peronal settings. We now see it as G�nter.
Ken, you pointed me in the right direction, thanks. Used bootchart and found that DHCP was a bottleneck: turned out that the fresh install had used DHCP when I’m always using a static IP. Restored the static IP via Yast Ifup and now the boot time is around 25 seconds, a significant improvement on my previous 50 or so - in other words, the expected halving of boot speed by using an SSD as a boot drive. So, in that sense, you were also wrong to assert that “the SSD doesn’t shine during boot”. Now it does! In fact, with the BIOS set to “Fast Boot”, it takes only 30 seconds from pushing the power button to a fully functional KDE4 desktop, not bad at all…
Is this better?
Agreed. Which is why I didn’t do it after first contemplating it. A nightmare for backups, and all sorts of complications with Virtualbox for example.
Nice when one agrres :).
Also nice you found the speed increasement.
Also nice you have a readable name now rotfl!
And the Dutch are so nice, make the best pommes frites in the world… Apologies if I sounded a bit impatient in my first reply to you…
On 06/05/2011 04:06 PM, gminnerup wrote:
>
> And the Dutch are so nice, make the best pommes frites in the world…
now now! no politics…
i say as i remember a guy in Belgium complaining about how the USA
calls’em “french fries” while he explained in great detail (with pride)
and arm waving that their pommes frites are the original and absolute
best in the world…
of course, i was standing in a tent in some small town outside of
Brussels that sold nothing but pommes frits! (hmmmm maybe they had bier
and sodas)
–
dd CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
via NNTP openSUSE 11.4 [2.6.37.6-0.5] + KDE 4.6.0 + Thunderbird 3.1.10
Acer Aspire One D255, 1.66 GHz Atom, 1 GB RAM, Intel Pineview graphics
- When your gecko is broken you have a reptile dysfunction! *
And we call them “patat friet” or short “patat”. Which is of course only a mispronounciation of the French words. But the French will call them “pommes frites”. Which in turn let the Germans call them “Pommes”. Yes, lannguages is a difficult subject.