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Re: Question: SSD speed



On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 12:48:09PM +0200, Sven Hartge wrote:
Jeremy Nicoll <jn.ml.dbn.25@letterboxes.org> wrote:
On Wed, 7 Oct 2020, at 09:39, Hans wrote:

I have a little question. Smartctl is telling me, that my ssd drive
is 6Gb/sec capable, but the actual speed is only 1,5GB/sec.

If your SATA (presumably) connection from the machine to the SSD is a
6 Gbps one, the maximum data transfer speed in bytes across that
connection would be one eighth of that (as there's 8 bits per byte),
so about 760 MBps.

That's about half of your "1,5GBps".  That makes me wonder if your SSD
uses two SATA channels at once - is that even possible?

Only with SAS drives. And usually only for redudancy and not for
concurrency.

I question the benchmark Hans did.

Something tells me he either used "hdparm -tT", which is known to
misrepresent the speeds on modern drives, or wrote too little data so he
was benchmarking the Kernel cache and not the drive.

I'd assume it's confusion between bits and bytes. For clarity, *never* use B or b, just write out bit or byte because some people put attach much more significance to the case of that letter than others--making it basically useless for communication. As others have already pointed out, there's probably a mismatch between SATA versions causing a SATA III 6Gbit/s device to negotiate down to SATA I 1.5Gbit/s. It's likely that the only solution is to replace the SATA controller. (Unlikely to be feasible in a portable device.) There is a small chance that it could be a bad cable and that replacing the cable would help.


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