Disk Copy Speeds

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Hi all,

Last night I was copying a 8 gig MKV file from one drive to another and was interested in what kind of speeds you get when copying from one drive to another (internal).

I have 1 x Seagate 250GB (IDE - had to get iDE on last system due to driver issues) and 2 x Maxtor 80GB (1st gen SATA).

I was copying the file (from the IDE to the SATA) at an average speed of 24MB/s - this seems really slow to me, but just how slow?

I'm running Ubuntu Karmic x64.

P.S. People with SSD's, please don't post here - I don't want to be ashamed

EDIT: Oh, i wasn't copying i was moving. Also just did a move of a 4gig file from SATA to SATA and am getting average of about 36MB/s - I guess the IDE interface is really dated now eh?

 

[Kroks]

A nice way to check the speeds of you HDD's on Linux is to use hdparm.

Open a command prompt and run the command hdparm -tT /dev/sda --- (you might have to do sudo and the sda can be substituted with sdb .. or hda ...

Here are some stats from my systems.
Server 1 – Dual XEON , 4GB ram 3 X 73 GB SCSI 10000 PRM in Raid 5
Suse Enterprize 9
hdparm -tT /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 3856 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1927.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 250 MB in 3.01 seconds = 83.15 MB/sec

Server 2 – Dual I7 Xeon 24 GB ram 4 X 500 GB SATA in Raid 6
Openfiler running in a VM on ESXI 4
hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 15728 MB in 2.00 seconds = 7869.64 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 862 MB in 3.00 seconds = 287.18 MB/sec

P.C. 1 – Core2Duo E4600 2.4 GHZ 4 GB ram 1 X 160GB Seagate SATA
Ubuntu 9.10 desktop

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 2632 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1315.68 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 186 MB in 3.00 seconds = 62.00 MB/sec

You can always use hdparm to tweak your IDE drives.
Have a look at
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=16360

 

[Rouxenator]

This can be be due to a lot of things, like how fragmented the drives are and what chipset you are using. The generation of the drives also plays a big part in this.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

/dev/sda: # the Seagate IDE
Timing cached reads: 2224 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1112.38 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 200 MB in 3.01 seconds = 66.40 MB/sec

/dev/sdb: # Maxtor SATA
Timing cached reads: 2288 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1144.09 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 170 MB in 3.00 seconds = 56.61 MB/sec

/dev/sdc: # Maxtor SATA
Timing cached reads: 2298 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1148.66 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 170 MB in 3.01 seconds = 56.40 MB/sec

 

[sn3rd]

The IDE bus is not necessarily dated... It's usually that the IDE drives are dated (and are not able to realise the full potential. Even today's mainstream hard drives are not realising the full potential of the bus they run on.