Slow disk I/O - was Re: Seeking Help

[compdoc]

>I do see that the drives come up as UDMA 133, not sure how to interpret
that.

That seems odd to me. The sata controllers should be set to AHCI, especially
for the SSD. The RAID option automatically uses AHCI, but onboard RAID tends
not to  work well with Linux. It doesn't sound like you're using RAID in any
case. I see in your mainboard's manual that AHCI is disabled by default.

Also in the manual, I see there is only one SATA 3 port. This runs at 6Gb/s
and is the port you should have your SSD connected to. 

>I then tried to run the benchmark using the Disk Utility but it gave an
error for every drive: "Error seeking to offset <number>"

Something is wrong with this as well. The benchmark should just run. I have
had problems with video cards and Ubuntu version 12.10, so try booting the
Live version of 12.04 and see if you can run the benchmarks. The Disk
Utility in 12.10 is different than the one used in previous versions.


> I did the memtest86 to determine RAM speed. It is listing at 17118 MB/s
and 32 GB size.

That seems fine. And it sees the entire 32GB of ram. My i5-2400 uses
DDR3-1600 ram and runs at 18975 MB/s. I think the only difference is the
type of ram we use. No errors running memtest86+, then? Did you let it
complete a pass?


> Pastebin: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/1561660/

I don't see anything that stands out here, although it's a lot of
information and maybe someone else will see something I've missed...

One thing I do notice is your ethernet controller: "RTL8111/8168B" These
controllers have been a source of problems in the past because of driver
issues, however, I thought those issues were largely resolved. (Oh, I see
you mentioned that the speed of the downloads were not a problem, so ignore
this)


> Also I see a GUID partition table with an error.
>
> WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk
doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.

Is this the error you see? This is normal and just means the fdisk program
cannot handle drives with GPT partition types because the program is too
old.