[cfarm-users] New M1 machine running Linux natively: gcc103

[Zach van Rijn]

On Sun, 2022-03-13 at 10:34 -0500, Zach van Rijn via cfarm-users
wrote:
> ...
> 
> The /home directory is mounted from an external USB-C NVMe
> drive because the internal storage is quite limited. Note that
> it does run at USB2 speeds because there is not kernel support
> *yet* for USB3. This will come in due course.

The USB2 performance has been tolerable, but is far from optimal:

4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB, 3.9 GiB) copied, 69.7739 s, 60.1 MB/s

Once the kernel gains USB3.1 support for these two ports we'll be
able to reach 10gbps, however in the interim I wanted to try to
improve the performance to 5gbps by installing a USB-A to USB-C
adapter on the USB-A port, which in theory now supports USB3.0.

So I purchased an adapter with good reviews for $4.00 USD to try.

While the adapter and disk work independently, they do not play
nice together, as determined by a test today. So we're stuck at
USB2.0 speeds until the kernel catches up. No one has complained.

Throughput could be doubled (1gbps) with networked storage in the
short term but I'm not sure it would be a better user experience.

Note that /tmp is tmpfs and that typical compiles write to /tmp,
so the performance is decent enough already.


ZV