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Non-system drive stutters the whole system

The distro is Artix Linux with Open RC and XFCE.

I wonder if there is something can be done to ease stuttering of my whole system? Maybe some kernel settings adjustment or partition change?
 The culprit is a cheap 480GB SSD which stutters heavy whenever I write any decent amount of any data to it. I do writing not so often actually.
I am reluctant to just unplug and dump it. Its read speed is ok and data loss is not an issue for now. Its role is a storage for any non-critical, non-system data (torrenting, etc.). The partition is one ext4 volume.

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #1 –
This is a very vague question and FWIW, it sounds like a hardware problem.  I have 4 ESATA and USB3 externals on my workstation and even on the web server.  They work pretty well although more than a few times external drives just die, especially the cheap pocket ones that you can but at Walmart for 50 bucks.   I also have 3 - terabyte sized  mini-sdhc's from my cameras that are attached to the system.

Everything works.  That your's stutters (whatever that specifically means) means something unusual is happening and you haven't provided any data to describe the specific problem.  Please help us help you.

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #2 –
Different hard drive enclosures cause me various problems on my Dell E7470 and M4500. A mains powered unbranded chinese one makes the pointer cursor work intermittently and stop and start on the M4500. A USB 3 enclosure with a spinning disk causes wifi interference from the clock pulses on the E7470, it's a known fault with some early USB 3 implementations. If I copy large video files from a high speed SD card to an external drive it often fails, I have to copy to the internal HDD first, the system doesn't seem able to cope with accessing both at once and results in an input output error at some random point. So my only solution has been to try various hw combinations and work around all the problems, ie not use wifi on the E7470 if I am using a 3.0 enclosure, or put the drive in a 2.0 enclosure if I am, and so forth. I have 4 different enclosures now, 3 of which were bought new, so this isn't faulty hw, just compatibility issues I think. You can also get faulty connectors and  cables, and moving the drive or cable while connected might cause problems too. I would suggest providing the exact hw details.

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #3 –
I had the same problem a while ago, writing to USB sticks and external drives (using rsync, cp, mv, doesn't matter) would stutter my system so much that it would be impossible to do anything other than basic tasks (playing videos was impossible).

I don't remember where exactly, but after searching for a long time I found some guy on the Arch forums that recommended installing amd-ucode. And voila, for some reason that fixed everything.

So, if you don't have them already, maybe try installing amd-ucode or intel-ucode? (depending on your CPU)
Also, do other external drives cause stuttering too?

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #4 –
Thanks for your concern. I`ll try to paint a bit clearer picture.  :)
It is a broken by design "goldenfir" (I guess it is safe to say "no name") SATA SSD drive from aliexpress. I beleive it is made of some trash like factory rejected parts. Slow NAND, slow MCU, no hardware buffer and "SLC cache" is tiny.

Let`s say I am downloading a big piece of a software on to this drive. Let it be 100GB. The download speed is about 3 MB\s. Or I may just copy some data on to it.
Every minute or 2 the  download stalls for about a minute or 2 and that is when this cheap drive is almost inaccessible: file explorer loads and shows its contents very slow,  every other download even from any other normal drives stalls too, sometimes even internet browsers starts and runs slowly.
 But all of this is not a thing when it just reads (seeds, whatever) its content. The read speed is up to 400MB/s w/o any stalls!

Both amd-ucode and intel-ucode are installed, my CPU is XEON E5-2678V3, 32 GB RAM
Yes, the cursor stalls sometimes too.

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #6 –
Quote from: starushka – on
Thanks for your concern. I`ll try to paint a bit clearer picture.  :)
It is a broken by design "goldenfir" (I guess it is safe to say "no name") SATA SSD drive from aliexpress. I beleive it is made of some trash like factory rejected parts. Slow NAND, slow MCU, no hardware buffer and "SLC cache" is tiny.

Let`s say I am downloading a big piece of a software on to this drive. Let it be 100GB. The download speed is about 3 MB\s. Or I may just copy some data on to it.
Every minute or 2 the  download stalls for about a minute or 2 and that is when this cheap drive is almost inaccessible: file explorer loads and shows its contents very slow,  every other download even from any other normal drives stalls too, sometimes even internet browsers starts and runs slowly.
 But all of this is not a thing when it just reads (seeds, whatever) its content. The read speed is up to 400MB/s w/o any stalls!

Both amd-ucode and intel-ucode are installed, my CPU is XEON E5-2678V3, 32 GB RAM
Yes, the cursor stalls sometimes too.
It might be that it doesn't like the I/O Scheduler that's currently in use. Try changing it. If you need custom scheduler's not available in stock artix kernel, try installing linux-zen.

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #7 –
Shoun2137

I am sorry! I totally forgot to mention that I use Liquorix Kernel.
  Thanks. I`ll give it a try tomorrow.

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #8 –
Well you could consider yourself  lucky to be able to buy things from AliExpress at all, the website (don't know about the mobile app) seemed to be blocked in the UK when I was trying to order some things this spring - you could get to the final point at checkout then the payment wouldn't go through either with PayPal or bank card, I spent about a week contacting AliExpress and PayPal help (who said it was blocked due to a security issue they could not disclose) without success before giving up and buying the same stuff  for a bit more elsewhere instead.

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #9 –
Quick test of linux-zen did not show any significant difference. Looking for some different schedulers and frequent kernel rebuilding? I do not feel like going Gentoo way. Artix suits me great for now. I`d rather discard the piece of work.
 
#######
I do not recommend ali, to put it mildly. As years go by, they become more vendor-oriented and less client-focused in general. I only use it if the sum is not too critical.
 I`d rather have Walmart and Amazon available instead. Though I get what you're saying, I don’t see myself as "lucky" - you maybe guessed where I am from.

Looks like it’s time to mark this topic as solved. Thanks, everyone!

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #10 –
I was looking at micro SD cards on eBay recently and there are many reports of some being fake and not giving the stated speed or sometimes even capacity, they are printed with big brand names but they are models that apparently don't exist on the official website or from manufacturers that don't produce these cards at all, and even cheap brands can have knock off versions around. It might be worth trying it with another enclosure and / or computer if you have one in future just in case there was a compatibility issue from elsewhere, the drive might work better with different connecting circuitry if it's not just faulty. All that glitters is not gold, you can find expensive trash as well as cheap trash. Like COVID no doubt the current situation is temporary and normal shopping will eventually resume!  :D

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #11 –
I actually have several SSDs of that same crooked kind. No matter if they're connected via USB3 enclosure or direct SATA, they behave the same across different PCs. There’s no way I’m going to buy those drives again! About two years ago, I got 3 decent  1TB drives from a local shop at a good price. No hiccups so far...

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #12 –
Just to chip in that I have also experience system lag when using my external drives. I am OpenRC with KDE and Artix kernel. I also have both processor u-codes installed. I mount both my drives with ntfs-3g.
HP Z640 - 72 x Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 @ 2.30GHz, 128 GiB RAM, 4GiB + 32GiB NVIDIA

Re: Non-system drive stutters the whole system

Reply #13 –
Quote from: metwo – on
Just to chip in that I have also experience system lag when using my external drives. I am OpenRC with KDE and Artix kernel. I also have both processor u-codes installed. I mount both my drives with ntfs-3g.


When the system is interrupted for a write to a drive and something goes wrong, it will halt the system until the interrupt is cleared.  The schedule is not going to swap out until the Hardware clears it to.