SSD performance problems -- config problem or old drive?

[GreyGeek]

Are your disks getting full? I.e., over 90%?

[chconnor]

That's cool, I'm mostly interested to use the VM idea for some development I may be doing that will require a Win install. My window partition is low on space, visual studio takes enormous amounts of space, and moving windows installations from partition to partition is so confusing and fraught and hard to research that i'd rather just get a new Win 10 going in a VM with one of those sketchy cheap licenses... I'm glad you brought it up because i was contemplating buying a new drive for this purpose, but a VM sounds nicer.

[oshunluvr]

Yes...

I will say the audio here is rather crappy, so may not be an option for you.

[chconnor]

Looks like both Reaper and Davinci have Linux versions...jus' sayin'

Totally, and I'm thrilled that they do... unfortunately I use a bunch of VST plugins in Reaper that are windows only... you can run a few of them via wine bridges in linux, but they are way too slow... and the ones that don't run at all are crucial to my work. I use Reaper in linux for tracking, but when it comes time to mix, it's back to dumb ol' windows. Resolve in linux can't export to h.264, can't import h.264 (in the free version), has no aac support, no mp3 support (I think? at least in the free version? been a while since I went through all that) which all make it impractical to use, quite unfortunately. If I used it more I might ante up the cash for the paid version.

Believe me I'll get rid of that windows partition the minute I can! :-)

[oshunluvr]

Looks like both Reaper and Davinci have Linux versions...jus' sayin'

[chconnor]

Great, I'll check it out. Can it map multiple monitors reasonably well?

[oshunluvr]

This should work: https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-ins...-ubuntu-20-04/

QEMU/KVM isn't as easy as VirtualBox but it's not rocket science and it way more efficient IMO. I can boot Win10 in a VM in about 12 seconds. The first couple times you try to create a new machine you may fumble a bit, like the way it handles virtual storage isn't obvious, but once you get it, it's cake. You can even set it up to allow hardware pass-through and give your VM direct access to the video card, for example. I didn't do that because it's not needed for what I use it for.

Can't hurt to give it a try. If you're accessing specific hardware via a midi interface you may have to work at that. It's even legal to run Win10 in a VM via the MS license.

[chconnor]

As far as the other - why do you dual-boot to Windows? Games I guess? Otherwise, Windows is much faster running in a QEMU/KVM virtual machine.

I boot to windows for audio production software and video editing (Reaper + associated plugins, and Davinci Resolve -- both have linux versions but for various reasons they aren't workable for me, or at least not well enough to wean myself off windows.) There are also a variety of other obscure things I need windows for, but they could probably run comfortably in a VM or wine.

Windows faster in a VM? I'm intrigued... do you have links or more info? It probably wouldn't be great for me, given the need for consistent and low latency with audio interfaces (?), but I'm still curious.

[chconnor]

Gotcha, thanks.

So I couldn't boot with "data=writeback", because on / apparently you have to also do:

$ tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda2

...however when I boot (now successfully) I don't see it in:

$ findmnt /dev/sda2
TARGET SOURCE FSTYPE OPTIONS
/ /dev/sda2 ext4 rw,noatime,nobarrier,errors=remount-ro,commit=60

...I expected "data=writeback" in there... /etc/fstab is:

UUID=1234 / ext4 noatime,data=writeback,barrier=0,nobh,commit=60,er rors=remount-ro 0 1

...any ideas? I notice that "nobh" also seems to be disappearing. Should I just ignore these issues and trust that data=writeback and nobh are in effect?

[oshunluvr]

I noticed that... so what you're saying is that "NVME is certainly better/faster but the benchmark misleadingly makes it look like it's roughly the same"?

It's kinda deceptive on both ends: The manufacturers will advertise the high-end numbers but not the roughly equal ones. My point is whether or not something like a drive type or file system is "better" than another is heavily dependent (and wildly variable) on your actual use-case. Is my nvme drive noticeably faster in some specific operations? For sure. Overall though, the difference is rarely very apparent. I think, using Linux, file system access times are more noticeable based on file system type rather than the storage medium - at least when it comes to SSDs. Moving off of platter drives for all except backup storage was a HUGE gain. The difference using the NVME drive is not as obvious (compared to SSDs) despite the differences in the specs.

It would be an interesting experiment to use the KDiskMark tool on some other file system types.

[oshunluvr]

Your symptoms sound like they could be tracked down and I agree there must be a problem somewhere if there's been a change. I wonder what overhead issue could be the culprit.

As far as the other - why do you dual-boot to Windows? Games I guess? Otherwise, Windows is much faster running in a QEMU/KVM virtual machine.

[chconnor]

The big take-away from my above results re. the NVME drive vs. SSD is the "Random 4K Q1T1" results are identical for all practical purposes, as are the writes for Random 4k Q32T16 benchie.

When people like me say benchmarks aren't of much use in the real world, that's what we mean.

I noticed that... so what you're saying is that "NVME is certainly better/faster but the benchmark misleadingly makes it look like it's roughly the same"?

[oshunluvr]

The big take-away from my above results re. the NVME drive vs. SSD is the "Random 4K Q1T1" results are identical for all practical purposes, as are the writes for Random 4k Q32T16 benchie.

When people like me say benchmarks aren't of much use in the real world, that's what we mean.

[oshunluvr]

I have 2 of them actually:

Device	Total_LBA	Wear_Leveling	Power_On_Hours
sda	31552575061	088	45217
sdb	38690114852	084	52563

[chconnor]

Is it possible, or rather likely, that the differences seen between the OSs are due to different benchmarking tools being used in each one?

Yeah I dunno... seems like CrystalDiskMark and KDiskMark are testing in nearly identical ways, but obviously I'm not the expert. I'm not worried about the fact that they get different results, per se, especially because of the ntfs issue... but the difference was pretty extreme. At any rate, even ignoring the windows side it's nice to get some sanity checking on the purely linux/ext4 side of things. I'm going to see if the mount options make any noticeable differences.