Debian boot time, SD vs SATA

[smysnk]

Hi,

Currently I am experiencing 1-2 minute boot time using Class 10 SD card.  Wondering if I move to SATA, what kind of improvement I can expect?

Also I have noticed some intermittent boot behaviour from SD cards, not sure if my card is flakey or this is some type of other issue.  Has any one experienced any problems like this?

Thanks,

Josh

[hnb2907]

Hi Josh,

I had enough trouble using various branded SD cards with raspberry-pi's, although on the A20 I've seen no problems.  I have a half a dozen A20's at home and work now.

The ones at work use uSD card's supplied by Olimex, with a modified version of their standard debian image on it.  I've recompiled the kernel, so they use the F2FS filesystem instead of ext4 for the root partition (search my other posts and you'll find some info on this from another forum member and myself).  One of these has been permantly running since late december '13 without problems.  Even before conversion to F2FS, I didn't see any issues with ext4 on a uSD card.  I don't use the window environment, and it boots to a point where I can telnet into it, using a static ip address, in about 25 to 30 seconds.

My A20 at home uses a SATA disk.  It also has a re-compiled kernel, to allow it to boot directly from the SATA disk.  This also doesn't run the window environment, and maybe 20 to 25 seconds to boot and accept an incoming ssh connection.

I've removed most things at boot-up that I don't need, so that's probably improved the time it takes for them to "get out of bed"!

Hope that helps a bit?
Chris.

[fromcologne]

Hi Josh,

I use a class 10 microSD original from Olimex for u-boot and the kernel image.
Debian FS is on SATA /dev/sda2. (I didn´t find information how to boot from SATA.
Sunxi wiki says it should be impossible)
It´s a headless server with DHCP and boot lasts at least 30 seconds.
Do you see timeout messages on console interface? DHCP or static IP?


fromcologne

[hnb2907]

Just to clear up any confusion: on my A20 at home, the kernel and uboot is on a uSD card, and debian installed on SATA partion /dev/sda2...  Similar configuration to that described by fromcologne

C.

[codifies]

I've had identical experiences to hnb2907 - enough to rule out rpi for practical uses (what with the USB hardware bug too) shame ...

The two things that occur to me is it waiting and failing to get a dhcp lease? Failing that fsck all partitions that get mounted in fstab ...

But that time to a minute or so does sound like dhcp ...