Dedicated Server Disk Speeds
alterego42
Member
Just picked up a 48GB Dual Xeon 5520 dedicated server with a 1TB disk.
Upon first login and a quick Debian package update the disk speeds seemed very slow. I decided to run a quick dd test (dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=4k conv=fdatasync) to verify and got speeds averaging 4 to 6 MB/s.
Thinking there was something wrong I wrote support and they advised they were able to get 8.1 MB/s.
Now I understand that this is an older server and I'm paying at a discount (about $350/year) but I'm now realizing I don't have a real idea of the disk speeds that are acceptable at that price point. I checked my other 10-15 shared VPS boxes and the slow average is around 30-40 MB/s.
To put it another way, I've never had anything noticeably slow enough that made me worry about a simple dd test.
What would your disk speed expectation be for this type of server?
** I'm not going to name the company because I'm sure it will be remedied and I'm not upset about having to deal with it as I'm coming from Delimiter so I'm a special breed of masochist. :-)
Comments
The disk or interface could be bad, but could also be a wrong test. Try:
wget https://www.janyksteenbeek.nl/linux/iotest.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash1TB disk indicates you have SATA disks. However disks can perform faster then you discrabed. Normally SAS perform 160MB/s. But for SATA - 60MB is best if you can have with cache. less then that you have serious problem..
4-6 MB/sec write speed is not normal for a SATA drive. That's slower then my USB 2.0 thumbdrives.
I have SATA 2.5 HDDs 7200 RPM in RAID1. Average speed is 80 MB/s.
CPU is L5420.
You should have better speeds, unless there is something busy right now in your server.
Normal SATA speeds are in the 180MB/s range for a 1TB HDD @ 7200 RPM. Are you sure you're not on a VPS? Run sudo lshw -class disk to find out what disk you have.
180Mb/s for sata is quite unbelivable until you have raid cache
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=4k conv=fdatasync
4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB, 256 MiB) copied, 1.50201 s, 179 MB/s
*-disk
description: ATA Disk
product: ST1000DM003-1CH1
vendor: Seagate
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda
version: ----
serial: -----
size: 931GiB (1TB)
capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=4096
Maybe the drive dying check it first.
kind of to short test
It's the same test the OP did. OP is getting 6MB/s.
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=6400k count=4k conv=fdatasync
4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out
26843545600 bytes (27 GB, 25 GiB) copied, 136.179 s, 197 MB/s
anyhow results are bad.. have like you slow speed indicates that someone is making huge io or your server is ... for entry level nodewatch is nice to have, if you have openvz. 30-40MB seems really bad indead
It is a ST1000LM048-2E71 (5400 RPM) that should definitely get better speeds on my non-shared and idle dedicated server. The company is looking into it but everyone helped with an idea on semi-expected speeds for this older server. Thanks again.
Dell H200 in IT mode. 4GB copy.
Seagate Momentus 500 XT (7200RPM, hybrid) = 104MB/s
WD Velociraptor 10k 300GB = 125MB/s
Hitachi 7200 RPM 2T = 131MB/s
Savvio 146GB 15k = 151MB/s
Cheetah 300GB 15k = 199MB/s