Be Jealous - a new toy for Dad - NVMe SSD M.2

[kenj70]

I'm at about 23 seconds from power-on to log in , but I mount over a dozen locations including four network drives.

I'm not complaining because my Windows 7 Pro laptop takes several minutes to be ready for login. More if there were recent updates.

That is very respectable fro what you call an older MB. I have the NVMe drive, a 500 GB HDD and a 1 TB usb external HDD and the power on to login measured about 26 seconds.

I try to save money by buying bargains - which may be so because they have some subtle flaws. Good enough for a hobbyist though. I sometimes say I am following the "trailing edge of technology" - because I can't afford the leading edge.

-=Ken=-

[oshunluvr]

I'm at about 23 seconds from power-on to log in , but I mount over a dozen locations including four network drives.

I'm not complaining because my Windows 7 Pro laptop takes several minutes to be ready for login. More if there were recent updates.

[kenj70]

I'd expect power on to log in time to be dominated by the POST of the firmware. My (2 year old) system with a Gigabyte motherboard takes at least 8 seconds. If you enable the grub menu, so that you can time the boot of the OS without the firmware, what time do you get? From grub to login my system takes 3 s. Systemd utilizes lots of threads starting everything, it's much faster than the old init. I don't mount any spinning drives at boot, they take seconds to spin up, though I suppose that would start at power on.

Annoyed by that 8 s delay, I suspend (to RAM) rather than shut down. It takes 1 s to wake up.

Regards, John Little

Sorry, I dropped the ball getting back to you on this one. I measured 9 seconds from grub menu to login screen. The new ASRock MB must have been a bargain because the POST process and the NVMe support are slower than the premium boards. Not a deal breaker but now I know more what is going on under the hood.

-=Ken=-

[GreyGeek]

I was given an 10" iPad for Christmas several years ago. I used it for about six months but finally gave up on it. It had an Internet connection but at the time I couldn't find a VIOP service that would work on it so I could make phone calls. Take it with me when leaving the house? It wouldn't fit in my pocket and I didn't want to carry a purse.

[kenj70]

I was thinking of going the other way ... when my computer dies just use my iPhone. During the last 50 years I've seen the rise and the beginning of the fall of personal computing. I've had a good ride surfing the digital waves. Now, I'm just setting on the beach wiggling my toes in the water.

Sounds nice. We used to own lake property.
Well then I hope your rig lasts a long time. Your expertise and helpfulness here is exceptional.

I have an iPhone as well - and sometimes I regret us getting those overpriced things. I just sent for a cheap tablet, keyboard combo from Walmart. I'm tired of trying to read my email and news on the dinky phone in the morning.

-=Ken=-

[GreyGeek]

Sounds like it's time to build a new rig. The advances in technology are impressive and I find these projects to be fun.

-=Ken=-

I was thinking of going the other way ... when my computer dies just use my iPhone. During the last 50 years I've seen the rise and the beginning of the fall of personal computing. I've had a good ride surfing the digital waves. Now, I'm just setting on the beach wiggling my toes in the water.

[kenj70]

IF I did you dd test it would put my machine out of action for an hour before I could use it again. All 8 cores would be sweating and begging for mercy.

Sounds like it's time to build a new rig. The advances in technology are impressive and I find these projects to be fun.

-=Ken=-

[kenj70]

bs just means "byte size". The dd commands create a tempfile of 10GB and time the amount of time is takes to write and then read it.
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I was just being silly - and you come back with a complete explanation of your script. You are a class act, my friend!

BTW, exploring my BIOS yesterday I tried changing a few settings, just to speed things up if I could. Next thing, the system wouldn't boot! I had to wrangle the box out, take off the cover and reset the CMOS. The older I get, the more I seem to shoot myself in the foot. 1800+ MB/s is plenty fast enough!

-=Ken=-

[GreyGeek]

IF I did you dd test it would put my machine out of action for an hour before I could use it again. All 8 cores would be sweating and begging for mercy.

[oshunluvr]

bs just means "byte size". The dd commands create a tempfile of 10GB and time the amount of time is takes to write and then read it.

Broken down, it's five commands

1. sync
2. dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=10240
3. sync
4. sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3
5. dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10240

1: flush any drive buffers
2: write 10GB of zeros to "tempfile"
3: see #1
4: clear any caches
5: read the tempfile

Obviously, run the test on a file system on the nvme drive and delete the tempfile when you're done. I did it twice, once with 1GB file and again with 10GB. I just thought it'd be useful as a comparison.

When I suggested the mobo might be at play, I was thinking BIOS and the interface throughput not CPU speed. You might look and see if there's a BIOS update for your mobo. NVME is rather new to the market thus might mean your BIOS is out of date.

If you're concerned about file access times, you might look into other things that can help your actual real-world access., like use of RAID or the file system you're using and fine tuning it.

[kenj70]

From what I recall the NVMe drives have ~4x the throughput of an SSD on a SATA 3 port. I got the NVMe to support HD video editing and, compared with what we had 10 or 15 years ago, it is plenty fast. I may be able to tweak the MB settings but I run pretty conservative settings these days; no overclocking; each build needs to last me 4 - 5 years to make the investment worthwhile. I thought of getting a second M.2 drive since my MB supports it but the I/O is fast enough now that I just keep an older 500 GB HDD as secondary for ready storage. Backups go on an external drive.

@oshunluvr - I looked over that long command line of yours. I don't begin to understand it. However, I was kind of concerned about that "BS" parameter.

-=Ken=-

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, my boot is delayed by several network drives that I mount. It's gotten better as I've gotten smarter about how to mount things. It takes about 13 secs. from grub menu to login here. Actually I haven't timed it since I installed the new nvme drive.

[jlittle]

... the lackluster boot to login time on this desktop rig. I was hoping for 10 seconds from power on. Unrealistic?

I'd expect power on to log in time to be dominated by the POST of the firmware. My (2 year old) system with a Gigabyte motherboard takes at least 8 seconds. If you enable the grub menu, so that you can time the boot of the OS without the firmware, what time do you get? From grub to login my system takes 3 s. Systemd utilizes lots of threads starting everything, it's much faster than the old init. I don't mount any spinning drives at boot, they take seconds to spin up, though I suppose that would start at power on.

Annoyed by that 8 s delay, I suspend (to RAM) rather than shut down. It takes 1 s to wake up.

Regards, John Little

[oshunluvr]

Sorry Jerry! Not trying to make you feel bad.

If it's any consolation, for most tasks you really don't notice the difference. Boot times are way better and obviously file transfers happen much faster, but not much else is noticeable.

[GreyGeek]

I couldn't stand it any more. I had to know what my HD were doing.

/dev/sda1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 358 MB in  3.01 seconds = 119.07 MB/sec
jerry@jerry-Aspire-V3-771:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1

/dev/sdb1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 268 MB in  3.02 seconds =  88.86 MB/sec
jerry@jerry-Aspire-V3-771:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 296 MB in  3.02 seconds =  98.12 MB/sec

It's better to not know some things.