btrfs makes old hdds appear to operate faster

[ventrical]

I was just doing a followup on a suggestion in another thread and achieved a successful install using btrfs.

The hdd is a Maxtor 5T020H2 (TAH71D0P), 20GB (older).

[ventrical]

at bootup I am still getting :

error: sparse file not allowed

[castrojo]

It's a bug, it's nothing to be worried about: http://askubuntu.com/questions/10032...rfs-filesystem

You can just hit a key and it'll keep booting.

[tgalati4]

Those older Maxtors are good drives. I've had one spinning for over 118,000 hours now.

Mine is a 20GB, Maxtor 92049U3.

Sounds like it's time to do some experimenting with btrfs.

[ventrical]

It's a bug, it's nothing to be worried about: http://askubuntu.com/questions/10032...rfs-filesystem

You can just hit a key and it'll keep booting.

Yes .. it is booting well in fact.

Thanks for the bug link.

[ventrical]

Those older Maxtors are good drives. I've had one spinning for over 118,000 hours now.

Mine is a 20GB, Maxtor 92049U3.

Sounds like it's time to do some experimenting with btrfs.

I loaded up some programs and then rebooted. Some programs seems to be indexed after the next boot, so they load real fast , ie; System Monitor, but it was not the case for Libre' Office Writer.

I am going to swap this drive into another system and then do an install on a faster hdd.

I cannot say , definitively for sure, that the one install so far is actually faster , but, by eyeballing it from previous installs, it appears to be working faster. More experiments needed.

[celluloid]

I loaded up some programs and then rebooted. Some programs seems to be indexed after the next boot, so they load real fast , ie; System Monitor, but it was not the case for Libre' Office Writer.

I am going to swap this drive into another system and then do an install on a faster hdd.

I cannot say , definitively for sure, that the one install so far is actually faster , but, by eyeballing it from previous installs, it appears to be working faster. More experiments needed.

I've done a fair bit of testing of btrfs, partly because of pure curiosity & partly because I specialise in Linux storage technologies for work.

Are you using default mount flags in your fstab or are you specifying specific mount flags? See: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Mount_options for your options, I found that the defrag and compression specific flags made some difference back when I was testing (late 12.04/12.10 dailies)

[pressureman]

Most computer slowness these days is caused by waiting for IO (unless you have an SSD), so disk compression makes good sense. The CPU(s) have enough idle time that the computational overhead of compression isn't noticeable, and the nice side effect is that it means the HDD has to read/write fewer blocks - hence IO will generally be faster.

This fact was trumpeted rather loudly by the Solaris crowd when ZFS compression first arrived on the scene.

[ventrical]

I've done a fair bit of testing of btrfs, partly because of pure curiosity & partly because I specialise in Linux storage technologies for work.

Are you using default mount flags in your fstab or are you specifying specific mount flags? See: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Mount_options for your options, I found that the defrag and compression specific flags made some difference back when I was testing (late 12.04/12.10 dailies)

I am stricktly using (/) root while using 'somthing else' option in Ubiquity.

[castrojo]

You might want to install `apt-btrfs-snapshot`, it'll create a snapshot every time you upgrade, which means theoretically you can undo a bad apt upgrade.

I've had it installed for a month now but I haven't found the time to actually try rolling back.