Rock64 4GB poor USB3 HDD performance

[KernelPanic]

I have the same problem with mine. I did read that SAMBA can be the issue. Plenty of articles on the NET to try and assist, but still stuck around 40MB/s for my HDD.   I think people have said FTP is very quick, so will probably test FTP tonight to see if that's the case because running USB benchmarks on my rock64 show the speed maxes out.

The whole reason for me buying the rock64 was to try and get better copy speed across my LAN compared to my banana pi ultra m2.

Will try Bionic soon.

Nah... Samba is fine. You don't have to migrate to Bionic. Just try putting "noatime" option in your fstab and use EXT4 format instead. If you still don't get at least  70MB/s, check your Samba config file (/etc/samba/smb.conf).

Sadly reformatting to EXT4 and adding noatime didn't solve my issue, I was still getting poor performance. I've done some reading and noatime and it seem it would help on writes, but not much on reads (where I also have problems).

I did notice though that I was probably doing something probably pretty stupid... 

I was under the impression that it was possible to dualboot with SCard / eMMC. All these test I've been doing was with the latest ayufan bionic setup installed on the eMMC.
To test If I was having these problems with other images I installed them on the SDCard and put on the jumper, but at some point I noticed that my kernel wasn't changing along with the images. Also uninstalling the newest kernel and reinstalling the older kernels gave me the newest one with uname -a (even though in the /boot/ directory I had the older kernel files). As you can see I'm still a but of a noob with linux

So I've taken out the eMMC, reflashed the OMV version Luke suggested and things seem a lot better now.

Here's some testing I've done so far

Write:

Code:

root@rock64:/srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1/test# sudo sh -c "sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
root@rock64:/srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1/test# dd if=/dev/zero of=/srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1/test/largefile bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 8.77703 s, 122 MB/s

Read:

Code:

root@rock64:/srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1/test# sudo sh -c "sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
root@rock64:/srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1/test# dd if=/srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1/test/largefile of=/dev/null bs=4k
262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.32938 s, 170 MB/s

That's more like it!

Code:

root@rock64:/srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1/test# iozone -e -I -a -s 100M -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 1024k -r 16384k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
       Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O
               Version $Revision: 3.429 $
               Compiled for 64 bit mode.
               Build: linux

       Contributors:William Norcott, Don Capps, Isom Crawford, Kirby Collins
                    Al Slater, Scott Rhine, Mike Wisner, Ken Goss
                    Steve Landherr, Brad Smith, Mark Kelly, Dr. Alain CYR,
                    Randy Dunlap, Mark Montague, Dan Million, Gavin Brebner,
                    Jean-Marc Zucconi, Jeff Blomberg, Benny Halevy, Dave Boone,
                    Erik Habbinga, Kris Strecker, Walter Wong, Joshua Root,
                    Fabrice Bacchella, Zhenghua Xue, Qin Li, Darren Sawyer,
                    Vangel Bojaxhi, Ben England, Vikentsi Lapa.

       Run began: Wed Apr 11 08:08:53 2018

       Include fsync in write timing
       O_DIRECT feature enabled
       Auto Mode
       File size set to 102400 kB
       Record Size 4 kB
       Record Size 16 kB
       Record Size 512 kB
       Record Size 1024 kB
       Record Size 16384 kB
       Command line used: iozone -e -I -a -s 100M -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 1024k -r 16384k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
       Output is in kBytes/sec
       Time Resolution = 0.000001 seconds.
       Processor cache size set to 1024 kBytes.
       Processor cache line size set to 32 bytes.
       File stride size set to 17 * record size.
                                                             random    random     bkwd    record    stride
             kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread    read     write     read   rewrite      read   fwrite frewrite    fread  freread
         102400       4     6531     8253    17112    15665    11585     3837
         102400      16     5599    33859    55510    58457    23807    18672
         102400     512    84667   124221   122587   158883    79472    68095
         102400    1024    94451   111794   102468   127790    98707    69394
         102400   16384    87343   130649   131979   146383   149821    90956

Write seem a bit low, anything I'm doing wrong with the parameters im feeding iozone?

Tested with Samba a bit and downloading from Rock64 hovers around 80 - 100MB/s, uploading seems to be about the same.
A lot better than my earlier results!

In case it my help someone, this is how OMV mounted the drive:

Code:

LABEL=boot /boot/efi vfat defaults 0 0
# >>> [openmediavault]
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1 /srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1 ext4 defaults,nofail,user_xattr,noexec,usrjquota=aquota.user,grpjquota=aquota.group,jqfmt=vfsv0,acl 0 2
# <<< [openmediavault]

and finally

Code:

root@rock64:/srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0B7VM-part1/test# uname -a
Linux rock64 4.4.77-rockchip-ayufan-136 #1 SMP Thu Oct 12 09:14:48 UTC 2017 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Thanks everyone for helping, I'll probably stick with OMV since I really like the webUI