Caching MemTest86 code in memory / very slow read from a USB stick

[bugmenot2]

Hello Team,

When being run from a USB stick, the load speed is extremely low.

Not only that, for some reasons the utility reads only the code which it's going to execute right away and reading the rest of the code is postponed.

That leads to a situation when after each memory test, the utility reads the next portion of its code which just doesn't look and feel nice.

I've tested with a USB 3 port and a 300Mbit/sec flash stick - it doesn't change anything.

// Artem S. Tashkinov

[David (PassMark)]

Maybe your USB drive is faulty.
(300Mb/s isn't actually very fast for a USB3 drive, in fact it isn't even USB2 speeds).

And no, the executable isn't read (or re-read) in small chunks during execution.

[bugmenot2]

Maybe your USB drive is faulty.
(300Mb/s isn't actually very fast for a USB3 drive, in fact it isn't even USB2 speeds).

And no, the executable isn't read (or re-read) in small chunks during execution.

I've tested this on three different PCs using three different USB sticks.

I can post a video if you're interested.

[bugmenot2]

And all my USB sticks are in a perfect working condition.

[David (PassMark)]

We still think it is hardware fault or slow hardware.
What make and model are the USB drives?
What are the hardware specs for the machine?
Can you post the log from MemTest86?
Are you using a rear USB3 port on the motherboard itself, or the front USB port on the case?

[bugmenot2]

I now have three different PCs exhibiting this issue:

A laptop with a Core i5 6200U CPU, all of its ports are USB 3.0 (3.2 gen 1)
An Intel PC based on the p8p67 chipset. I've tested using USB 3.0 ports.
An AMD PC with the X570 chipset. I've tested using USB 3.2 gen 1 and gen 2 ports.

And three different USB 3.0 drives, where the fastest has 200/100 MB/sec read/write speeds.

I've check both front and back USB ports.

I'll post a log later.

[hackasynthetic]

I'll post a log later.

Is it log time yet?

I'm using the UEFI version of MemTest86 v8.4 Free but I don't see the USB Stick led flashing(thus no read/write is happening on it) while say test 6 is running.

Which version were you running? V4, V8 ?

[hackasynthetic]

There may be some truth to this. I've noticed that my memtest86 start time(or should I say boot time? from the time POST screens goes away) while usually being 3mins was recently 4 mins, that is 4 minutes until I get to the part in memtest86 where I can press S to start! I don't know why it varied, but it was always at least 2-3 mins!. But then I used a new card reader and new card and now start time is 15 seconds tops!!!!!
The prev. card reader+card are able to do 6MiB/sec in Windows. The new cardreader+card is able to do 15MiB/sec in Windows. I've no idea why the prev. one was so slow, bbut I'm just gonna blame the UEFI BIOS in Asus Prime Z370-A v2401

[David (PassMark)]

Sequential read speed is only part of the story. The random seek & read times is probably more important. This is sometimes called "IOPS 512K Read" or "512K IOPS Q1T1". (Single thread queue depth 1)

Most devices (HDD, Flash and SSD) are much much slower to read a single random sector that a sequential read of a large file. Some are abysmally slow. Write speeds are also often far worse than read. MemTest86 only does a tiny amount of writing (to the log file on boot and test report at the end of the test), but if the drive is super slow it can slow down everything else.

Here are some results from our PerformanceTest Advanced Disk Test on a Kingston USB3 16GB Flash drive.

This is a 'good' USB drive, but performance it still pretty awful in the worst cases. The no name units are often worst than this.

Kingston claim 100MB/sec read for this drive, but in many cases it only does 1MB/sec or less.

[hackasynthetic]

Very cool. I'm sure that could be it, or at least adding to it. However, 4 minutes is a long time to just get to the GUI, I can't imagine how poor the random r/w must be for that to happen. My guess is that BIOS is also setting it to some abysmal USB1 speed or something. Hey, maybe that BIOS setting where I can set it to be Floppy or Harddisk can have something to do with it? Maybe I could retry and edit this comment later on...

[hackasynthetic]

Can't edit it (too late).
I think you were right! It is the USB Stick: it's a SanDisk MobileMate(tm) MS+ with a 4GB card SanDisk Memory Stick Pro Duo MagicGate inserted in.

I put it in a different system(laptop) and it booted just as slow (at least 2 mins, didn't wait though)

On the original desktop system, setting Harddisk, Floppy, Forced FDD, CD-ROM had no effect, but once after reboot(ctrl+alt+del) BIOS didn't detect the device at all (but it may be due to tCL=14 which gives 1 error in test 3 of extreme1 in TM5 in like the first 10mins, ie. that's how I know I needed to increase tCL, but it was 14 at the time of this test, so maybe it errored in the right part of POST to not see the USB Stick one time)