How to make a 5400rpm HDD faster than SSD

BTRFS file system matured enough to use it as daily driver, so I converted my secondary HDD, and....

Mind you, I only have SATAII interface in my laptop (which has transfer limit of ~250-270MB/s), and a fairly old Core 2 Duo CPU.


Here is the disk read/write speed results before conversion:

Code:

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 12.8981 s, 83.2 MB/s (write)
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 10.7839 s, 99.6 MB/s (read)

And here after – same disk, same conditions, same data:

Code:

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.05498 s, 265 MB/s (low score of write due to SATAII limitation)
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.58047 s, 679 MB/s (read)

And get that:

Before - done on a plain unencrypted data partition.
After - fully encrypted partition! (serpent-xts-plain algorithm)

I believe the correct terminology is "wow!".


The main cause of that difference is BTRFS utilises transparent data compression. But that's not an issue even on my old dual-core CPU.


Of course, BTRFS is a linux filesystem so... suck on that, Windows and MacOS

 

Secondary HDD?

How would this compare on a C: drive disk? Not to mention that the 'wow' would fluctuate depending on how compressible your files are. ;0

 

C:\ drives exist only on Windows. I am using SSD for my system drive and I put BTRFS on it, too, so now my HDD is no longer faster

You are right that it depends on compressibility of files, so you probably wouldn't get that high when transferring a large compressed video file, but you can also use forced compression, so even such files would compress to some limited extent.

But on a system disk most files is compressible.

Also, bear in mind my hardware limitations: CPU and SATAII and disk encryption. On an i5 or i7 CPU with SATAIII you would get even more than that.

 

You've got me interested, that's for sure. Would love to try this for myself, but without my programs (i.e. workflow) this would be mostly an academic exercise.

Is there any indication that this can be adapted (ever?) to more mainstream O/S's?

 

You have three options on linux:
1 - You should look into alternative linux software (there's loads of it)
2 - run workflow it in Wine - I am doing that for some windows games and programs
3 - run virtual machine like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS3ANNEnRDE (just skip to 5:50)

(Note, that I do not recommend the Vista of linuxes that is Ubuntu)

No. Three reasons:

1. Linux is mainstream. Non-mainstream are things like OS2, or maybe FreeBSD. Sure, linux may be behind Windows and Mac (not sure about that) for home users, but that's only because of people are lazy and unwilling to change, even if it's an easy change, and for better. Seriously, I used to be a Windows power user, but thinking now of using Windows as my main OS would be like buying a motorbike and ride on it by propelling it with my feet. Also, in that analogy foot propulsion would be quite expensive, and petrol would be free.

2. MS and Apple don't like open source. There is a reason they are stuck on prehistoric, backward and handicapped file systems like NTFS and HFS.

3. Apparently, there are some legal barriers that make it prohibitive, or at least difficult to adopt such things on Windows and MacOS even if they wanted to.