On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 06:43:09PM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
I have a new 8TB Seagate drive, extracted from a USB3 "Backup Plus" drive and installed on a SATA3 connector. It has a single partition on it.
The actual disk is a "ST8000AS0002-1NA17Z" which is an archive drive so I'm not expecting stellar performance, but even so it feels very slow.
It's a shingled drive, which means random writes are going to seriously suck but large sequential writes should be ok, as should reads.
For example, running up a Windows VirtualBox VM from that disk feels like it's being dragged through treacle (the host PC is an i7-6700k with 32GB RAM so it should run comfortably).
I'd speculate I may have poor disk alignment but I don't know how to check; the results of Googling got me to sudo parted /dev/sda "align-check optimal 1" which reports "1 aligned".
Am I just pushing the drive in a direction it doesn't want to go?
Would it actually perform better if returned to the USB3 case? It seems unlikely but then maybe Seagate hobble the drives for direct SATA to discourage them being taken out?
No, it's not a suitable drive for a VM workload. It's a suitable drive for throwing large amounts of data on which is then going to be read lots, or rarely touched again.
J.