You might want to make a bee-line for the Harrow District Masonry Centre next Saturday to visit London Show, at which Chris Hall says he’ll be demonstrating what he believes is the fastest RISC OS computer.
Or computers, because he explains that he considers it to be a dead heat between two, which he says are “a DeskPi Mini IO board using an M.2 1TB NVMe drive running RISC OS Developments Block Drivers (6-Oct-2024) and a Pi Foundation IO board using a 1TB ‘FAST’ SATA drive running RISC OS Bits custom RISC OS ROM (28-Jul-2024) with SATA support” both of which are based on an overclocked Compute Module 4 (from the Pi mob) with 1TB drives formatted with 4KB sectors.
Chris provided a technical article along with his announcement:
How fast is ‘fast’?
There are several machines available now with fast storage. How do they compare?
First on the scene was the i-MX6 from R-Comp, launched at the 2014 London Show and made available to buy a few months later. This used SCSIFS with an on-board SATA (Serial AT Attachment) socket.
Next was Titanium from Elesar. First announced the night before the 2015 London Show, the motherboard (you had to build your own machine around it – at first) went on sale in December of that year, and saw a speed up from improved software in 2018. This used ADFS with an on-board SATA interface.
The Pinebook Pro appeared in 2020 and was available from R-Comp from August of that year*. The laptop has an option for internal fitting of an NVMe drive, for which drivers were made available in 2024.
* Records here in the bunker indicate it was first shown to the public at the 2021 London Show, and became available as a product that punters could buy at the 2023 Southwest Show, so it may be that Chris means R-Comp first made it available him and other testers that early.
Launched at the Southwest Show In February 2023, RISCOSbits were selling some ‘FAST’ hardware – a SATA adaptor for the Raspberry Pi I/O board with an ADFS driver in ROM. By 2024 this supported drives with 4KB sectors.
And by 2024 both RISCOSbits and R-Comp had drivers available for M.2 NVMe drives fitted to various proprietary I/O boards and adaptors including the DeskPi Mini (aka PiRO Qube), the Pi Foundation I/O board with a suitable adaptor, and the Waveshare Mini I/O board.
Test results
When comparing overall speed there are two principal components: processor speed and storage speed. Since the fastest machines are pretty much all using the Compute Module 4 (Pinebook Pro using NVMe not yet tested) the focus has to be on storage speed.
The formatting of a drive can make quite a difference: a small improvement in speed can be obtained by using a larger LFAU (large file allocation unit) than the minimum for that partition size, at the expense of disc capacity for small files. This is probably not a good idea on partitons smaller than 240GB in size.
A significant improvement in speed can be obtained on an NVMe drive by switching its sector size from 512 to 4,096 bytes (4KB). A SATA drive formatted to 4KB sectors shows a speed improvement for random access but, the overall benefit is marginal for ‘real world’ tasks.
Conclusion
When formatting a drive, a small improvement in speed can be obtained by using a larger LFAU than the minimum for that partition size, at the expense of disc capacity for small files.
The minimum LFAU for 512b sectors is 4KB for partitions up to 128GB, and 8KB for the largest partition size of 256GB. For drives with 4KB sectors it is 16KB for 512GB, 32KB for 1TB, and 64KB for 2TB, the largest.
Formatting an NVMe drive to 4KB sectors improves speed considerably. DOS partitions such as Loader (used on some machines as part of the start up process to get RISC OS seen and running) are not supported on 4KB discs by DOSFS and Fat32FS – but neither are they necessary. Further partitions can be added, provided that an MBR (Master Boot Record) partition table is added to protect the filecore partition, but will only be seen by Linux.
The benchmarks tables on my website have been updated.
