I have a 128GB SSD and 1 TB hdd. I was going to dual boot arch with windows on ssd. So I copied all my files from home folder into hdd and mounted it at home folder instead of the ssd home partition. But what happens is that when I try to login via sddm, my laptop runs too slow. it takes about a minute to get to the desktop. Every process becomes slow.
I ran hdparm command while ssd is home folder. It gives value of about 20MB/s for first time and then the value increases to ~150 MB/s with next tries.
However when I run hdparm command while hdd is home folder, the value remains at 15-20MB/s.
Here is output of smartctl -a /dev/sda (my hdd):
Smartctl_hdd
Just a thought, but did you also update fstab when you moved home?
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yes. Everything (except that audio devices are also not recognized in hdd home) is fine except the speed.
There is a command ‘systemd-analyze blame’ that might help you find some info on the boot up time. From my own experience, it was when something in fstab was out of sync with the system that caused my slow down.
Find more info on boot time here.
Good Luck.
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Not trying to be a smartass here, but I think downgrading from an SSD to an HDD can have this expected effect. Especially if you have a high quality SSD, that is actually pretty quick, you will notice how slow an HDD can be, comparatively.
It also depends on the HDD. I don’t think it is likely, that it applies to your HDD, but the bigger the HDD is (usually the average case with HDDs of 8TB and above) they have a special way of how they are build and how they save files. This makes these particular HDDs cheaper, but also even slower than the already slow average HDDs, that are 1TB or less. That’s because those HDDs are only meant to be used for backups, which means, they are supposed to be accessed only once in a while, while the smaller and quicker HDDs or, better yet, SSDs, are meant to be used on a regular basis, for example, on a daily basis.
Especially this part is not surprising. This is totally normal, especially if you have a lot of small files in your home folder. This is nothing out of the ordinary.
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Yes, HDD are much slower then SSD. That’s for sure. The other thing I thought of is that a laptops only have one slot for a SSD or HDD. If the HDD was connect (being used) via USB port then it will be even slower then a HDD connect directly into the laptop.
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I think that gives the time upto the login screen. But hdd comes into play only after I login into account having hdd as home folder.
Actually, it is so much slow, that you can’t work with it. If I press the application dashboard icon, it itself takes about 30 seconds to launch.
I have experienced a similar issue myself. In the end, it resulted in a faulty HDD, that basically was reading/writing with its last breath. Don’t know if it might be the case for you, but perhaps you could look into it, just to exclude the possibility of HDD failure, i.e. data loss.
Looking at the HDD’s SMART results, it’s weird to me, that there are two important attritbutes missing, C5 and C6.
However, everything else seems fine and considering its a 2.5" HDD, it is less likely to be at fault, because those small laptop HDDs are built with higher resilience, because people tend to move around their laptop when it is running, even though this shouldn’t be done.
Do you have the possbility to put in a second 1TB HDD, replacing the first one and checking if the newer one is faster? It would be optimal, if the replacement HDD would have the same or very similar specs to the currently installed one.
Additionally, when running the speed tests, you need to run them from a live system, that does not access the storage media, except for the test. The tests may be very blurry, if you run them from the system that actively accesses the storage media.
Actually the laptop is quite new, only 4 5 months old. As also the Power_on_hours is just 697. So I don’t think that is the case.
That would not be possible.
If the drive is unmounted, then is that correct?
@Akito Can you give me some layout for my /etc/fstab file ?
cat /etc/fstab
/dev/sdb2
UUID=d7d1e360-c1d0-49f6-b463-9ebb7c2b869e / ext4 rw,relatime 0 1
tracefs
tracefs /sys/kernel/tracing tracefs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0
/dev/sdb1
UUID=23B0-DEEA /boot/efi vfat rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro 0 2
/dev/sdb5
UUID=27118508-e31c-463b-86d0-3f956b92700c /home ext4 rw,relatime 0 2
#/dev/sda1 /home ntfs rw,relatime 0 2
Right now its like this. /dev/sda is the hdd which I commented because of the problem.
/home ntfs rw,relatime 0 2
Why NTFS?
I think a Linux-native filesystem would be much better for /home.
I don’t have enough knowledge to tell you the 'why’s. But, from my own experience, I can tell you that maybe you can try to install the Linux again and in this process you tell the installer that you want to use that partition as the /home partition.
Maybe that way Linux assumes everything in they’re right place.
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