What is dev-sda.device in systemd-analyze, can i disable it?

Question

I have Ubuntu 16.04 installed on my Laptop alongside windows. In systemd-analyze blame a service called 'dev-sda7.device' is taking too much time. How to resolve this problem or should i disable it ?

Result of systemd-analyze time

Startup finished in 4.207s (firmware) + 4.576s (loader) + 3.466s (kernel) + 33.899s (userspace) = 46.149s

Result of systemd-analyze blame

         16.326s dev-sda7.device
         12.859s ufw.service
         11.263s systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
          7.935s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
          3.203s keyboard-setup.service
          2.736s vboxdrv.service
          2.467s accounts-daemon.service
          2.349s apache2.service
          2.239s NetworkManager.service
          2.163s ModemManager.service
          1.963s lightdm.service
          1.843s nmbd.service
          1.749s samba-ad-dc.service
          1.599s systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-B053\x2dA56B.service
          1.367s thermald.service
          1.127s polkitd.service
          1.112s systemd-journald.service
          1.066s teamviewerd.service
          1.007s udisks2.service
           975ms apparmor.service
           926ms plymouth-start.service

Result of cat /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=493cc833-193e-435d-840a-b862ca367fba /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=B053-A56B  /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077      0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=a49f56b1-53c3-4eaf-9460-0a221e59957a none            swap    sw              0       0

Solution

You can't disable it, because /dev/sda7 is where your root partition is mounted. In systemd, everything that it can handle while booting is made into a systemd unit. Then you can do things with it (like track timings in this case, or depend on it for services). In the cases of devices, the chain goes like this:

• the kernel loads the device and activates it
• systemd watches for this and creates the /dev/sdxy nodes for it
• then systemd activates the various mount units generated from fstab
• which then triggers various other services which were waiting for filesystems to be mounted
• and so on

This does allow you to identify that the disk is slow to activate, but unless you can get a new disk, there's not much you can do about it.

You can try analysing the critical path and see if there's anything else you can fix:

systemd-analyze critical-chain [UNIT...]  prints a tree of the
time-critical chain of units (for each of the specified UNITs or for
the default target otherwise). The time after the unit is active or
started is printed after the "@" character. The time the unit takes to
start is printed after the "+" character. Note that the output might be
misleading as the initialization of one service might depend on socket
activation and because of the parallel execution of units.

Example:

graphical.target @10.868s
└─multi-user.target @10.868s
  └─squid-deb-proxy.service @10.816s +51ms
    └─network-online.target @10.814s
      └─NetworkManager-wait-online.service @2.419s +8.395s
        └─NetworkManager.service @2.243s +155ms
          └─dbus.service @2.192s
            └─basic.target @2.129s
              └─sockets.target @2.129s
                └─snapd.socket @2.127s +1ms
                  └─sysinit.target @2.127s
                    └─swap.target @2.127s
                      └─dev-disk-by\x2duuid-498d24e5\x2d7755\x2d422f\x2dbe45\x2d1b78d50b44e8.swap @2.119s +7ms
                        └─dev-disk-by\x2duuid-498d24e5\x2d7755\x2d422f\x2dbe45\x2d1b78d50b44e8.device @2.119s

For example, in my case the network is slowing startup.