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Writing speed on FreeBSD 9-RELEASE-p3 amd64

Now that I’ve switched to FreeBSD 9.0, I thought I’d repeat the write speed test I did in 2010 on my desktop machine.

The test is writing approximately 10 GB data from /dev/zero to /tmp/foo:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo bs=10M count=1000

The test was done on otherwise idle machine. But contrary to 2010, it is now running some extra daemons.

Characteristic Value
Operating System: FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE-p3 amd64
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9300 @ 2.50GHz
Chipset: ICH7
Controller: atapci0: Intel ICH7 UDMA100 controller

Partition layout:

/dev/ada0p2        491M    204M    247M    45%    /
devfs              1.0k    1.0k      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ada0p4.eli    382G    179G    173G    51%    /home
/dev/ada0p5         49G    3.7G     41G     8%    /tmp
/dev/ada0p6         19G     10G    7.9G    56%    /usr
/dev/ada0p7        2.2G    311M    1.8G    15%    /var
devfs              1.0k    1.0k      0B   100%    /var/named/dev

Output of atacontrol cap ad4:

pass1: <WDC WD5001ABYS-01YNA0 59.01D01> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
pass1: 150.000MB/s transfers (SATA, UDMA5, PIO 8192bytes)

protocol              ATA/ATAPI-8 SATA 2.x
device model          WDC WD5001ABYS-01YNA0
firmware revision     59.01D01
serial number         WD-WCAS87154115
WWN                   50014ee256bb8a8a
cylinders             16383
heads                 16
sectors/track         63
sector size           logical 512, physical 512, offset 0
LBA supported         268435455 sectors
LBA48 supported       976773168 sectors
PIO supported         PIO4
DMA supported         WDMA2 UDMA6
media RPM             7200

Feature                      Support  Enabled   Value           Vendor
read ahead                     yes    yes
write cache                    yes    yes
flush cache                    yes    yes
overlap                        no
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)   no     no
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)   yes            32 tags
SMART                          yes    yes
microcode download             yes    yes
security                       yes    no
power management               yes    yes
advanced power management      no     no
automatic acoustic management  yes    yes     254/0xFE        128/0x80
media status notification      no     no
power-up in Standby            yes    no
write-read-verify              no     no
unload                         no     no
free-fall                      no     no
data set management (TRIM)     no

Test results:

10485760000 bytes transferred in 217.169097 secs (48283850 bytes/sec)
10485760000 bytes transferred in 214.993010 secs (48772562 bytes/sec)

Conclusion

The writing speed (46 MiB/s) is a lot slower than on 8.2 (75 MiB/s). Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the drive is not working as a SATA2 device, but only at SATA speed.

For comments, please send me an e-mail.

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