Poor buffered disk reads Odroid HC2

[TWM]

I run armbian on an Odroid HC2. Using hdparm -t /dev/sda I get merely roughly 130MB/s on buffered disk reads. This is way below the expected value for my 2TB Crucial SSD. It is obviously not a major issue as the speed is anyway bottlenecked by the gigabit ethernet. I'm just curious, does anyone get better speeds with a similar setup? I read that poor performance can result from a misaligned partition. Checking the alignment with "align-check" of parted does report that the parition alignment is fine, so I suspect this is not the issue in my case. 

Edited May 6, 2020 by TWM

[Werner]

Just for the heck of it did you try an image with Linux 5.4.x as base or with a different SSD?

[TWM]

Thanks for post. uname gives me 5.4.28-odroidxu4. I don't have another SSD, but I doubt the problem relies with the SSD as it is (essentially) brand new.

[TWM]

Update. So I tried on ArchLinux. There I get roughly 370MB/s.

[Werner]

Interesting.

Which kernel do they ship with?

 

Btw.

Quote

This board is stripped Odroid XU4 and we use the same images, however, we provide a specially optimized config (for kernel 4.14.y or higher) which has to be applied manually. This results in shorter boot time and lower consumption. Run armbian-config utility and go to section system -> DTB and select optimized board configuration for Odroid HC1. The same config is valid for HC2 and MC1.

Did you try this?

[TWM]

I did select the HC1 optimization in armbian-config. On arch uname gives me 4.14.165-1-ARCH. 

[Werner]

Hm. Hardkernel repo is currently at 4.14.176 so I assume ARCH includes some custom patches....

[TWM]

I noticed that in idle Arch draws almost 2 Watts more than amrbian. Maybe I need to experiment with the cpu governor and min and max cpu frequency settings.

[Werner]

So far ARCH and Armbian using the same 4.14 sources from Hardkernel. ARCH seem not to apply any patches to it, Armbian just does stuff that should not interfere with performance:https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/master/patch/kernel/odroidxu4-legacy

[Igor]

On 5/6/2020 at 12:55 PM, TWM said:

Using hdparm -t /dev/sda

Use the same version of proper tools like http://www.iozone.org/

 

9 hours ago, TWM said:

 5.4.28-odroidxu4

 

Kernel is talking with hardware - if you do compare, use the same kernel - Linux distribution has little to do with this. 5.4.y on Odroid XU4 is in a worse shape than stock 4.14.y, but this is going to be changed eventually ...

[lanefu]

https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/2073