5

I recently upgraded my ultrabook to have a 128GB SSD (Crucial v4).

The speed of installing ubuntu was shockingly slow, worst i've ever experienced. Once installed i did some testing and the speeds show as being good and boot time is alright but when it comes to installing anything it is taking an absolute age.

Using apt-get is fine downloading, again when it comes to unpacking things go extremely slow (Took 10 minutes to install Terminator). Running firefox is becoming a burden as well.

Benchmark:

$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

 /dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   12428 MB in  2.00 seconds = 6218.55 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 718 MB in  3.01 seconds = 238.78 MB/sec

Ultrabook Specs:

  • Intel i5-3317U
  • 4GB RAM
  • 128gb Crucial v4 SSD

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

4
  • That rather sounds like an issue with something else. Could you please add the apt log from when you installed Terminator (usually /var/log/apt/history.log)? Also check other log files for suspicious entries.
    – LiveWireBT
    Nov 8, 2012 at 17:56
  • Nothing weird in the history log file, it's really frustrating me now :(
    – BB1873
    Nov 8, 2012 at 20:03
  • 1
    Have you checked for FIRMWARE updates? Mar 1, 2013 at 17:27
  • How much space do you have left on you drive? A SSD which is almost full will have bad performance. Also, how are your drive mounted? Can you give us the output of "mount"?
    – MadMike
    Jan 9, 2014 at 21:31

2 Answers 2

0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA explains what you should expect from the SATA interface.

By the benchmark you should a have SATA 3 interface on the motherboard.

That's is a test made on my pc (SATA 2) with a Samsung SSD using Ubuntu 13.10

EasyNote-TJ71$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 3162 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1581.37 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 730 MB in 3.01 seconds = 242.69 MB/sec

Installing time and loading time of webpages is capped by network speed. Check http://www.speedtest.net/ to test network speed.

1
  • edited. i have indeed SATA 2
    – Silux
    Jan 9, 2014 at 16:12
-1

Enable noatime (I really recommend to clean install 13.10 as 12.10 is outdated). Hope that you found it helpful because newer kernels treat better SSD than older kernels.

7
  • Disabling atime has nothing to do with hdparm results. As a side note: Adding "noatime" disables writing access time, thus increasing speed. "Disabling noatime" would mean to enable it.
    – MadMike
    Jan 9, 2014 at 16:20
  • Can you explain why @MadMike ? 12.10 has no support, updating gives him a newer and better kernel and disabling noatime increases greatly ssd speed and stops them to degrade as fast, why vote me negative if you have no idea what you are talking about?
    – Brask
    Jan 9, 2014 at 16:23
  • noatime is a mount option. hdparm will test read/write speed to the raw device bypassing the filesystem
    – MadMike
    Jan 9, 2014 at 16:25
  • I have always seen improvements in the degrade of my SSDs and improve in speed doing this, and what about updating the Ubuntu version for a newer kernel and better treatment of the SSD?
    – Brask
    Jan 9, 2014 at 16:29
  • You are correct that 12.10 isn't supported by Canonical anymore. But since the question is about the SSD speed this is irrelevant. Adding noatime will give you more read performance when reading lots of files. But I don't see any evidence that a newer kernel will give you more performance. As of right now this is just speculation. How about if you would add instructions on where exactly to add noatime and how to do it. Also I'd add that upgrading to a newer Ubuntu to have a supported version.
    – MadMike
    Jan 9, 2014 at 21:27

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