More Fun with Linux I/O Stats

I did not disclose boot times or time spent reading with my previous post. This is because the Linux drive is, in fact, on SATA 2 and not SATA 3.  My motherboard only has a single SATA 3 (6 Gbps) port, and Windows was already on it.  I installed a second drive for Linux, which means that the new SSD went on SATA 2 instead.

However, I did temporarily swap the cables, and take some numbers for Linux booting with SATA 3 instead.  This occurred on Ubuntu Studio 21.04, which is the version that I have installed on the bare metal, rather than inside a virtual machine.

The boot time for Ubuntu Studio from Grub-to-desktop was at most 1 second faster on SATA 3, although Linux did report half the time spent reading in /proc/diskstats.

From this, I have to conclude that the disk is not a limiting factor: whether the disk is spending 5.5 or 11 seconds to return data leads to boot times of 13.6 vs 14.5 seconds.  Cutting the bandwidth in half only raises the overall boot time by 6.6%.

In fact, the last boot before I uninstalled VirtualBox, but on SATA 3, recorded 40914 I/O requests, 1958574 sectors, and 10917 ms waiting for the disk, for a 16.0 second boot.  After merely uninstalling VirtualBox and rebooting, there were 16217 requests (60% fewer), 1256806 sectors (36% fewer), 5698 ms waiting (48% less), and 13.8 seconds wall time (14% less).  For what it’s worth, “used memory” reported just after the /proc/diskstats check dropped from 673 MB to 594 MB (12% less).

In other words, the interface is less relevant than whether VirtualBox is installed.

(The virt-manager + Cinnamon experiment was caused by the removal of VirtualBox, but happened after I/O numbers were finished.  Also undisclosed previously: the drive itself is a Samsung 870 EVO 250 GB, so its performance should be fairly close to the limits of SATA 3.)

The conclusion remains the same; more speed on the disk is not going to help my current PC.  My next PC (whether Windows 10 or the hardware gives way first) will support NVMe, but I probably won't use it unless there are a couple of M.2 slots.  Being able to clone a drive has been incredibly useful to me.