SSD I/O extremely slow installing/booting Ubuntu 12.04
- by Menda
These are some useful specs:
Macbook Pro 7,1
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 2,5" SATA SSD (120 GB). Has SandForce driver.
Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop 32 bits.
One 18 GB partition for GNU/Linux and 1.5 GB for SWAP.
MD5 for the Ubuntu install CD is OK.
I tried to install Ubuntu. It seems that everything is recognized, but there's a big problem: read and writes to the SSD are extremely slow. For example, the install process, which shouldn't take more than 20 minutes, it takes 7 hours. Then, booting up the computer takes about 20 minutes. I checked and the problem is definitely the SSD. Every access to any file is like 10 times slower than normal.
I have tried to format the partition as Ext4 and Ext3 with the same problem.
Trying to install other distros like Fedora 17, I have a similar problem. There's a "lag" with the SSD, but not so accused as in Ubuntu. Surprisingly, Debian 6.0 installs and works without any problem. Mac OS works pretty good as well in the other partition, so I discard it's an SSD problem.
Thanks for your help!
