[kwlug-disc] Trouble Reading 1 TB Hard Drive in USB SATA Dock

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2022 at 6:57 PM Ron Singh <ronsingh149 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Doing a backup of 13.5 Gig of data(mostly small files) from my MS
> Onedrive(locally sync'd on my SSD) onto a 5400RPM 512G USB3 2.5"
> HDD(Hitachi), I am seeing Thunar sucking up 18%-26% of my i7-2640M CPU for
> the duration. PC is running Mint 20.2 Xfce.
>

I got a USB 3.0 dock, and connected it to the same 'server' (i.e. desktop)
that had the now dead e-SATA
dock. The server has only USB 2.0 ports and will be replaced soon with
another desktop that has USB 3.0.

Here is a detailed capture of performance data before, during and after the
backup at 5 minute intervals.
The tool is dstat.

The incremental backup size was 17GB.

As you can see, wait for i/o is high, but that is expected for any
intensive disk operation.
What is also high is user time, and I think this is because of using USB
and not SATA.

stem---- --total-cpu-usage-- ---load-avg--- ---procs--- ---system--
-dsk/total- --io/total-
ime     |usr sys idl wai stl| 1m   5m  15m |run blk new| int   csw | read
 writ| read  writ|
03:56:37|  4   0  95   0   0|0.26 0.22 0.19|2.0   0 0.1| 296   294 |   0
 42k|   0  3.56 |
04:01:37|  4   1  94   2   0|0.73 0.32 0.22|3.0 1.0 0.3| 358   358 |5644k
45k|50.1  4.10 |
04:06:37|  7   2  78  13   0|1.92 1.11 0.58|3.0 1.0 0.1|1119  1254 |  31M
1365k| 418  10.0 |
04:11:37| 20   3  50  28   0|2.84 2.04 1.12|3.0   0 0.5|2244  3133 |  25M
16M| 336  47.8 |
04:16:37| 18   2  50  29   0|3.21 2.66 1.65|1.0 2.0 0.2|1877  2470 |  19M
14M| 245  46.2 |
04:21:37| 21   3  42  34   0|2.59 2.72 1.97|2.0 2.0 0.2|2030  2752 |  22M
22M| 226  57.1 |
04:26:37|  7   1  71  20   0|1.30 1.96 1.87|  0 2.0 0.0|1081  1381 |  10M
4037k| 227  13.3 |
04:31:37|  6   1  84   9   0|0.43 1.24 1.60|5.0   0 0.3| 740   979 |5083k
 933k| 113  7.02 |
04:36:37|  4   0  95   0   0|0.29 0.66 1.24|1.0   0 0.0| 314   318 |5338B
43k|0.10  3.72 |

When I swap the servers, I will check if USB 3.0 is faster, and uses less
CPU time.
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