jaybee Posted May 26, 2011 Share Posted May 26, 2011 Yes I know a lot of you run your server 24/7, but here in the UK atleast some of us are looking to save £l£ctricity as much as possible. I was wondering how quickly your servers boot from cold, and from standby if you like. How much does the USB stick (or boot media) affect the boot time? I ran a couple of experiments earlier before I commit to giving the GUID of my chosen USB stick as I have a few lying around. I loaded unraid trial onto 5 different USB sticks of differing age/speed and booted into unraid on my laptop. I know a laptop is not a fair representation of a server test full of HDDs, but I'm just trying to guage USB drive performance impact. I define a complete boot as simply getting to the logon prompt for this test. Is this flawed? What would you consider a full boot? Time before poweron and ability to serve media? My findings were that the boot times ranged between 25-30 seconds. This is just me booting to USB and letting it automatically boot after 5 second warning with no intervention from me to speed it up by pressing a button. I also benchmarked all my USB pendrives and got results for read and write in Crystal Disk Mark for sequential, 512k, 4k, 4k 32. It seemed apparent that the most noticeable statistics that affected boot time, seem to be the 4k and 4k QD32 random read and write tests, rather than sequential stats. Perhaps my question should be, what does unraid do when it boots and what contributes to time taken. Any thoughts on the matter? I have a USB stick which is twice as fast as any other stick I have which I will test with in a few days to see if this affects performance dramatically. I also noticed that boot time on an older laptop was 25-30 seconds, yet using my fastest USB stick on a faster laptop took 50 seconds. Why would this be? To do with what was detected in the hardware during the faster laptops boot? Link to comment
kizer Posted May 26, 2011 Share Posted May 26, 2011 I can tell you my work computer boots nearly half the speed of my home server. Must be because my work PC is a 2.8ghz Quad Core. Personally I believe any old USB stick should work as long as its of good quality. You don't want to exchange speed for reliability. The OS primarily uses RAM for operating so I don't believe worrying about the speed of the USB to be a big concern accept maybe if you are a boot speed junky. As for boot speed I don't think I've ever measured it, but I'd guess in the 1-3minute range or maybe even longer. Of course that means from push on to able to access the http://tower Keep in mind everybody's boot time will differ based on configuration of hardware and what they have in their go script. Link to comment
boof Posted May 26, 2011 Share Posted May 26, 2011 Mine takes forever to boot. Measured easily in minutes and not seconds. I would say probably ~ 5 mins. Mostly loading the kernel image. USB2, branded stick (SanDisk), half decent machine - core2duo. never really understood why. bubbaQ posted some suggestions below : http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6430.msg62723#msg62723 but I haven't explored them as I don't reboot often enough for it to be truly upsetting. Having said that..50 seconds worst case? luxury Link to comment
Blofeld Posted May 26, 2011 Share Posted May 26, 2011 sounds strange....mine boots in about a minute as well, which I reckon is about the norm. Link to comment
PeterB Posted May 26, 2011 Share Posted May 26, 2011 My exploratory test build, based on an old Asus A8N-E mobo, took several minutes to boot. The same USB stick, in my DH55TC/i3 machine boots in around 30 seconds. The difference is in the speed at which the dots get written across the screen! Perhaps it's related to the video! Link to comment
dgaschk Posted May 26, 2011 Share Posted May 26, 2011 Booting is a long sequential read. Make sure that your getting USB 2.0 (Hi-speed) not USB 1.1 (Full-speed). USB 3.0 should be even faster. Link to comment
S80_UK Posted May 26, 2011 Share Posted May 26, 2011 My server - dual core Atom (D510 @ 1.67MHz), 5 data drives + parity drive + cache drive 31 seconds from power on to end of unRAID / memtest86 menu timeout. 32 seconds from there to fully booted. Link to comment
burtjr Posted May 27, 2011 Share Posted May 27, 2011 Mine takes forever to boot. Measured easily in minutes and not seconds. I would say probably ~ 5 mins. Mostly loading the kernel image. USB2, branded stick (SanDisk), half decent machine - core2duo. never really understood why. bubbaQ posted some suggestions below : http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6430.msg62723#msg62723 but I haven't explored them as I don't reboot often enough for it to be truly upsetting. Having said that..50 seconds worst case? luxury I initially had a SanDisk Cruzer stick (older model) that took forever to load. I used my second pro key on a class 10 SD card and now boots in less than 20 seconds. I keep mine on 24/7 where I am living now, but will secure it at night once we move into our new house. I am extremely happy with the SSD card. Link to comment
aRe-eYe-pEa Posted May 27, 2011 Share Posted May 27, 2011 I walk away from my server when I have to reboot. unRAID loads quickly, but the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8's take their sweet time to complete their spin-up. Which if they continue to do so reliably I can stand. (Knock on wood.) Link to comment
jaybee Posted May 27, 2011 Author Share Posted May 27, 2011 I take it that card does it in a stable/slow way possibly even using staggered spin up? Link to comment
aRe-eYe-pEa Posted May 28, 2011 Share Posted May 28, 2011 Yes, it uses staggered spin-up. I think it is less taxing on the system so it's a good thing. Besides when I have had SATA or power connection issues I can pretty much tell from the bios screen that shows which drive is spinning up when. If the drive takes longer than the rest of the drives to initialize it could have issues. Link to comment
Johnm Posted May 28, 2011 Share Posted May 28, 2011 once i get past all the bios / mv8 post crap, i take about 20-30 seconds to post. even with several add-ons and the Mario brothers tune loading in my go script. Link to comment
jaybee Posted June 5, 2011 Author Share Posted June 5, 2011 And what about shutdown times? How long typically does unraid take to shutdown? I know it spins all the disks up then unmounts them. Can this take a long time? I am trying to select a UPS and want to know how long a clean shutdown would take. Link to comment
dgaschk Posted June 5, 2011 Share Posted June 5, 2011 Clean shutdown takes about a minute. Link to comment
jaybee Posted June 5, 2011 Author Share Posted June 5, 2011 Clean shutdown takes about a minute. Really? I was under the impression it took "minutes" to shutdown a server and it put it under considerable load during the process spinning up all disks etc. Anyway, 1 minute is amazingly quick imo and refreshing to hear. How many disks is that? Or is that largely irrelevant? Link to comment
Johnm Posted June 6, 2011 Share Posted June 6, 2011 I mine takes quite a while. maybe a 2- 3 min. especially if all my disks are asleep. My UPS says it can do about 15 -28 min depending if my second server is is on. I have my server shut off at 6 min after power failure and that is only because i shut my other one down at 4 min after power failure. The second box relies on the unraid box for the shutdown info. If it is off that long, i doubt it will be right back on. i rather play it safe then try to stay up at long as i can. Link to comment
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