I've never had a problem with USB drives on Linux, but I wonder if your problem is with the software you use for copying?
I usually use the cp command, or rsync. If you pass -P to rsync, it will output a progress counter as it transfers. Also - one other thought - could the effect you're seeing be a cache effect? Typically data transferred to a disk is written to a RAM cache on the disk, so small transfers look like they're blazingly fast, but then slows down to the real speed of the media once a few GBs have been transferred. But even with that, you should still be seeing a few 10s of MB/s transfer onto a hard drive, unless you've got a major fragmentation problem. Cheers On Sat, Aug 08, 2015 at 10:18:22AM -0600, Gillian Densmore wrote: > yesterday while backing up somethings to a drive of some sort that connects > via USB my (mostly) linux computer I ran into something odd I'd wondered > how many others experienced > > I wanted to back up stuff like art, notes and what not- the kinds of things > that'd be more or less impossible to replace and I've found backups are > king, queen and arguably emperor: anyway: > > Transfer started ok at about 10-15MBS Then slowed to a a crawl. The kind of > crawl that'd make a traffic light maker proud. Like from 10-15MBs down to > about 1MB to about 64Bytes a second. > > This seemed...odd. A quick and dirty google showed that Ubuntu has a > mixed history with USB drives. It's perplexing because just a week ago > different thumb drive, the kinds you find on keychanes and medallions of > varius kinds, it'd saw that drive and moved files full speed > > FWIW I was amused that for some reason I could upload some fi > > Sufficed to say > I thought it'd be worthwhile asking how many others ran into that kind of > issue. > > It also amused me I could backup some of those things to dropbox, and > skydive in as much and sometimes less time than basically a disk to disk > transfer. > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
