Slow file transfer from Linux to external drive
SolvedEglantier3333 Posted messages 350 Registration date Status Membre Last intervention -
Hello,
I have Linux Mint Mate Gnome installed alongside Windows 10 and I bought a 1TB Kingston SSD that I would like to install in my laptop.
I transferred my 2340 files from Linux Mint to my external hard drive for a total of 195GB, but it took a good hour and a half.
The transfer is quite slow and after a while, it fluctuates between 23MB and 29MB per second, something like that.
Is there a solution to prevent the speed from dropping?
Note that there are many files smaller than 10MB, but also several ISO images that are 2GB and larger.
If I turn my old 512GB Kingston SSD into an external SSD by putting it in an enclosure, will the speed be higher?
Thanks in advance.
Sincerely.
Eglantier
5 réponses
Hello,
I purchased an SSD enclosure from the brand Sabrent (I've heard that Sabrent accessories are really good) and I put my old 500 GB Crucial SSD in it, where I've copied all my personal files, which number 2,340 files.
Then I copied 1,945 files from my personal files (total size of 166 GB) into my directory following the recent installation of Spiral Linux.
What a speed difference! This morning, I was capped at 42 MB/s for copying everything to my external SSD, and now for copying 1,945 files, I was capped at 375-380 MB/s, that's huge!
The transfer took 6 minutes compared to an hour and twenty minutes this morning...
However, for transferring videos, at one point, the speed dropped to 180 MB/s.
Best regards.
Hello,
Apart from the USB port's bandwidth, the speed drops because the copy operation targets multiple files at once; as soon as it deals with a large file (here 2 GB), everything else lags behind.
We can circumvent this by copying in successive chunks, but it's purely cosmetic; as soon as it comes to copying the large file even alone, the speed will decrease.
Good evening Brucine,
That's annoying. I'll try to get around it as you suggested.
Thank you very much for your response and for your help.
Best regards.
Hello Mamiemando,
Yes, my problem is solved.
I just have one question: if I put an NVME SSD in a case to make it an external SSD, would the speed be even higher, even with USB 3?
Thank you in advance.
Best regards.
The observed throughput is the minimum of several throughputs:
- The connectivity used (for example, USB3 is faster than USB2)
- The read or write speed of the hard drive (for example, an NVME drive is faster than an SSD drive, which is faster than a SATA drive)
- In the case of an external drive, the enclosure may play a role (but can only slow things down)
- In the context of a network transfer
- the protocol used (for example, FTP will likely be faster than SSH)
- any nodes (proxies, routers...) and communication channels (WiFi, Ethernet cables...) involved.
So if I go back to your question, it all depends on where the bottleneck is. There's no point in having a super-powerful drive if something else is limiting the bandwidth. To determine this, just look at the maximum throughput of the component you are considering (here, the hard drive) and see if it is indeed the one that limits the throughput. If not, it means that the drive is not the one slowing things down, but something else (and installing a more powerful drive won't change anything).
Good luck
So, is your problem solved?