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> I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve

> I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it. It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance.

mehhh 7y ago
A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). Newer hard drives tend to be pretty snappy under Debian, unless your disk is degraded (eg: dying blocks causing I/O to chug, watch for SMART errors).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wtallis 7y ago
  > A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). For sequential transfers, yes. But that's hardly ever the relevant figure for whether your system feels fast. You should be looking at the random read performance, where your hard drive is good for ~120 IOs per second and your SSD is good for several thousand at a minimum.
  - amichal 7y ago
    This. Last magnetic laptop drive I had was measuring under 10MB per second with small random reads. On a fragged old OS install it’s unbelievably impactful. Back in windows 98 days simply copying my data to a second partiton, erasing and reinstalling the OS and copying ALL the data back would get me back to like new for a few months. When a drive is nearly full “defrag” is not that successful. Similar things happen with nearly full SSDs via other mechanisms
    - wtallis 7y ago
      If you were getting multiple MB/s, then your random reads weren't particularly small. A 1TB 3.5" 7200 RPM hard drive gives only 0.25–0.6MB/s for 4kB random reads depending on how much it is short stroked.
- lathiat 7y ago
  The problem with HDDs is rarely the sequential speed but the IOPS; of which you get around 100 per second. The problem is that since the majority of machines have SSDs now developers no longer optimise the number of IOPS or care about it; or notice it at all - as SSDs have orders of magnitude more IOPS performance than a HDD. Combine that with many people having quite a few background programs that will spew IOPS randomly you'd be surprised how fast the disk gets slow. Even MacOS which until recently (and maybe even now) sells machines with a HDD as standard; with pretty much no extra software installed is unbearably unusable on a HDD. SSDs are basically required at this point.
- pixl97 7y ago
  100MB/s of sequential transfers. Change that to 4k IO's and it can drop to 500KB/s on a laptop hard drive easily.
realusername 7y ago
> It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance. On Windows 10 it's definitely worse for sure. I don't know what they did since Win7 but it's pretty much unusable without an SSD now whereas a Debian would still run quite okay although slower.
- IloveHN84 7y ago
  I feel the same with the switch from HDD to SSD on Mac.. without a SSD, MacOS is really slow
  - smnrchrds 7y ago
    And yet Apple still sells their base model 2019 iMacs with HDDs.
- oweiler 7y ago
  In my case it was Windows Defender. Disabling it made a huge difference.
- ianai 7y ago
  Linux might pull data off the disk less often than windows and mac.
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  It's the "modern" WinRT applications for sure. When you're running a 5400 RPM HDD and the calculator application needs several seconds to cold start, you know they must have made some pretty terrible design decisions.
0815test 7y ago
I wouldn't be so sure. Linux still makes very good use of spinning rust media, and on a modern system with 2GB+ RAM (and a reasonably light distro like Debian) much of it ends up being used as disk cache so drive speeds aren't even that relevant. SSD's do speed up the boot process though, I'll give you that.
- masklinn 7y ago
  The thing is they went from Windows on spinning rust to Linux on an SSD. * Modern windows has a really hard time on spinning rust, they'd have seen extreme performance improvements going to windows on an SSD * Linux deals better with spinning rust, they'd have seen performance improvements going to linux on spinning rust The SSD is still going to be most of the performance improvements. The gap between a 5400 HDD and an SSD (even more so NVMe) is just ridiculous on every single metric, there's orders of magnitude differences in throughput (especially on random reads or writes) and even more so latency and concurrency.

mehhh 7y ago

A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). Newer hard drives tend to be pretty snappy under Debian, unless your disk is degraded (eg: dying blocks causing I/O to chug, watch for SMART errors).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wtallis 7y ago
> A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). For sequential transfers, yes. But that's hardly ever the relevant figure for whether your system feels fast. You should be looking at the random read performance, where your hard drive is good for ~120 IOs per second and your SSD is good for several thousand at a minimum.
- amichal 7y ago
  This. Last magnetic laptop drive I had was measuring under 10MB per second with small random reads. On a fragged old OS install it’s unbelievably impactful. Back in windows 98 days simply copying my data to a second partiton, erasing and reinstalling the OS and copying ALL the data back would get me back to like new for a few months. When a drive is nearly full “defrag” is not that successful. Similar things happen with nearly full SSDs via other mechanisms
  - wtallis 7y ago
    If you were getting multiple MB/s, then your random reads weren't particularly small. A 1TB 3.5" 7200 RPM hard drive gives only 0.25–0.6MB/s for 4kB random reads depending on how much it is short stroked.
lathiat 7y ago
The problem with HDDs is rarely the sequential speed but the IOPS; of which you get around 100 per second. The problem is that since the majority of machines have SSDs now developers no longer optimise the number of IOPS or care about it; or notice it at all - as SSDs have orders of magnitude more IOPS performance than a HDD. Combine that with many people having quite a few background programs that will spew IOPS randomly you'd be surprised how fast the disk gets slow. Even MacOS which until recently (and maybe even now) sells machines with a HDD as standard; with pretty much no extra software installed is unbearably unusable on a HDD. SSDs are basically required at this point.
pixl97 7y ago
100MB/s of sequential transfers. Change that to 4k IO's and it can drop to 500KB/s on a laptop hard drive easily.

realusername 7y ago

> It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance. On Windows 10 it's definitely worse for sure. I don't know what they did since Win7 but it's pretty much unusable without an SSD now whereas a Debian would still run quite okay although slower.

IloveHN84 7y ago
I feel the same with the switch from HDD to SSD on Mac.. without a SSD, MacOS is really slow
- smnrchrds 7y ago
  And yet Apple still sells their base model 2019 iMacs with HDDs.
oweiler 7y ago
In my case it was Windows Defender. Disabling it made a huge difference.
ianai 7y ago
Linux might pull data off the disk less often than windows and mac.
throwaway8941 7y ago
It's the "modern" WinRT applications for sure. When you're running a 5400 RPM HDD and the calculator application needs several seconds to cold start, you know they must have made some pretty terrible design decisions.

0815test 7y ago

I wouldn't be so sure. Linux still makes very good use of spinning rust media, and on a modern system with 2GB+ RAM (and a reasonably light distro like Debian) much of it ends up being used as disk cache so drive speeds aren't even that relevant. SSD's do speed up the boot process though, I'll give you that.

masklinn 7y ago
The thing is they went from Windows on spinning rust to Linux on an SSD. * Modern windows has a really hard time on spinning rust, they'd have seen extreme performance improvements going to windows on an SSD * Linux deals better with spinning rust, they'd have seen performance improvements going to linux on spinning rust The SSD is still going to be most of the performance improvements. The gap between a 5400 HDD and an SSD (even more so NVMe) is just ridiculous on every single metric, there's orders of magnitude differences in throughput (especially on random reads or writes) and even more so latency and concurrency.