Slow copy speed

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1

I have a very odd slow copy speed to my hdd’s for some reason I can’t figure out.

When plotting with mm I get around 55 Mb/s average*, when system idle it goes up to about 70 Mb/s

But the hard disks (Exos 12TB sata) are connected directly to the mainboard (asrock rack ep2c602-4l/d16) on the sata3 ports with one of these cables:

Anybody got any idea’s what might cause this?

*It also seems that Madmax automatically waits for the copy to finish before starting the new plot, even though I am not using the -w option

2

Regarding Madmax waiting for copy:

There was a bug in a version from a few weeks ago that always waited for copy. It was fixed in a later release. If you haven’t updated in a while, maybe try that.

1 Like
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I’ve come across a few Seagate drives with their write cache disabled as default and had to use sdparm/hdparm (SAS/SATA) to enable it.

hdparm -W 1 /dev/sg0

In some rarer cases where the lock was bios related the Seagate SeaChest toolkit was required.

SeaChest_Configure -d /dev/sg0 --sctWriteCache enable

4

It could be related to your connection method. I am using WD Elements Desktop 6TB and I am getting nearly 250 MB/s in the first plot and around 120 MB/s in the last plot. This is while plotting also.

I connect my drives through the USB 3 hubs by the way.

5

Yeah this is something I was looking into.
tnx for sharing the commands, will try. I already enabled it in the Disk manager, but somehow that doesn’t seem to work too well. I also disabled all the sleep timers there, but half the disks are still showing standby (zzz) icons.

But still, even without cache, the write speed should be a lot better.

@kreaninw First I thought it was because of sata2 ports, but sata3 ports gave the exact same speed. Then I switched the cable but still same speed. I will try a regular Sata cable next and see if that makes any difference.

Also the transfer speeds to the drives connected via the perc310 are better, but still below normal Sata3 speed. SO I wonder if there is something that could be limiting the mainboard bus speeds somehow. But I have no idea what that can be.

6

actually I just thought of something, all my drives are formatted ntfs instead of ext4, can this make a difference that big?

Formatting the drives with Ext4 was causing them to make a lot of annoying noise for a long time, so I switched to Ntfs for that reason.