Poor Disk Performance
>> What's good for one user may be bad for another<p>I bought 3 "identical" old Dell T3610 workstations off eBay for a home lab project. They have "identical" striped HDDs in them.<p>Kicking off a Fedora Core OS install on all 3 simultaneously (which i've had to do a few times as i learned how ignition works) results in the same ordering of the hosts finishing their rebuilds -<p>Machine 2 always finishes first by around 3 minutes of a 14 min wipe & reinstall process.<p>Machine 3 finishes ahead of machine 1 by around 45 seconds or so usually.<p>Almost 5 minutes in a <20 mins process, that's huge! I still don't actually know the root cause. Benchmarking disk I/O has them within a few percent of each other. It's not that they're contending to remotely load the OS installer - that gets cached in memory at the start. There's a few seconds difference in the UEFI bios startup timings but none of them are particularly consistent which is weird, i would have thought UEFI init time would be the same on a given host each boot, but there's a few seconds in it each time.