USB file copy very slow

Aidenn · 2010-02-09 20:15:05

Luis Sousa wrote:

I think that it is a kernel bug, because this error is recent to me, 2 months old max... And in ubuntu works fine.

yeah, 800kB/s seems like a bug. I'd wager it's that OHCI thing (you can get max 1,5MB/s with OHCI, and that's if the wind blows reeeally good). mine all go on EHCI though, maybe it's a recent kernel bug with some specific mobo group (I'm on a P45 Asus P5Q mobo). did you check Ubuntu kernel's .config and/or patchset for changes related to your mobo chip?

Luis Sousa · 2010-02-10 06:31:35

Aidenn wrote:

did you check Ubuntu kernel's .config and/or patchset for changes related to your mobo chip?

Not really, i'm on Asus F3Sv laptop, and yesterday the crap hit the fan. I've been using my USB HDD for storage, and yesterday i realized that all i copied into it turned back unreadable (it's not a HDD problem). I'm on Ubuntu right now, and will have to search for more information about this error/bug, it's becoming unconfortable relying on Arch... Also, a tool to delete unreadable files in HDD USB would be appreciated. Smartmontools analysing doesnt work (i'm figuring because is usb).

Aidenn · 2010-02-10 09:08:32

"unreadable" files mean that the disk was unplugged prematurely in most cases. maybe some other form of file corruption took place, FAT filesystem is notoriously known for its corruptability. for that tool you wanted, assuming your stick is FAT16/32 formatted, use dosfsck (or chkdsk if you have a windows machine).

DDspeed · 2010-02-10 15:28:28

I'm trying to make thunar-volman mount my pendrive with the sync option. After some research I've found that volman (or exo-mount, which is the thunar-volman's backend used for actual mounting) ignores the HAL policies and uses it's own set of options. It appears that in current versions the options are no longer hardcoded and can be changed in the file /etc/xdg/xfce4/mount.rc. I tried adding the sync option there for vfat filesystems, but exo-mount still does not mount it with the sync option (at least according to the output of mount command). I also tried copying it to ~/.config/xfce4/ and editing it there, but still no luck. Does anyone have a solution?

Aidenn · 2010-02-10 15:40:14

DDspeed wrote:

I'm trying to make thunar-volman mount my pendrive with the sync option. After some research I've found that volman (or exo-mount, which is the thunar-volman's backend used for actual mounting) ignores the HAL policies and uses it's own set of options. It appears that in current versions the options are no longer hardcoded and can be changed in the file /etc/xdg/xfce4/mount.rc. I tried adding the sync option there for vfat filesystems, but exo-mount still does not mount it with the sync option (at least according to the output of mount command). I also tried copying it to ~/.config/xfce4/ and editing it there, but still no luck. Does anyone have a solution?

can't think of anything. but sync isn't that important, it doesn't change the real speed. just remember to unmount the stick before you plug it out, or use the sync command (when it goes back to the command prompt, it means you can unplug). I don't know if XFCE does it, but Gnome has a little popup when you click unmount, which tells you to wait for the flush and disappears when it's safe to unplug. with -o sync it's a bit more user-with-ADHD-resistant, but ultimately nothing really important.

DDspeed · 2010-02-10 15:54:12

can't think of anything. but sync isn't that important, it doesn't change the real speed.

Yes, although it still is annoying that the apparent speed of transfer is not true, and that the transfer don't actually finish after the transfer progress window disappears. Using the sync command everytime I copy anything to the pendrive is not a comfortable solution.

Aidenn · 2010-02-10 16:04:00

DDspeed wrote:

can't think of anything. but sync isn't that important, it doesn't change the real speed.
Yes, although it still is annoying that the apparent speed of transfer is not true, and that the transfer don't actually finish after the transfer progress window disappears. Using the sync command everytime I copy anything to the pendrive is not a comfortable solution.

that's true. in the event TVM guys didn't think of that at all, you might want to try using simply autofs, adding -o sync with it is dead simple. though it doesn't use udev directly, so it may be a bit of a hassle to set up some rules if you use more than one USB stick at a time and/or have different partition set on them.

Luis Sousa · 2010-02-10 18:08:39

Aidenn wrote:

for that tool you wanted, assuming your stick is FAT16/32 formatted, use dosfsck (or chkdsk if you have a windows machine).

Unfortunatelly it's NTFS, it doesn't work but thanks for the tip anyway...

Aidenn · 2010-02-10 18:13:47

Luis Sousa wrote:

Aidenn wrote:
for that tool you wanted, assuming your stick is FAT16/32 formatted, use dosfsck (or chkdsk if you have a windows machine).
Unfortunatelly it's NTFS, it doesn't work but thanks for the tip anyway...

then I'm afraid only Windows will help. haven't heard of any reliable *nix chkdsk replacements working with NTFS. by the way, why NTFS? it's not faster, so why choose it for the stick? FAT32 is more compatible, reliable (except when it corrupts itself, but that's easily fixable with fsck) and by far more widespread for flash sticks and cards than NTFS.

thestinger · 2010-02-10 18:18:21

I've used to have lots of programs with my USB flash drive but I fixed it by giving up FAT32 and formatting it as ext2. Copying files is a lot slower for me in linux than windows in general but it has improved noticeably while I think windows has gotten slower...

Luis Sousa · 2010-02-10 18:36:34

Aidenn wrote:

by the way, why NTFS? it's not faster, so why choose it for the stick? FAT32 is more compatible, reliable (except when it corrupts itself, but that's easily fixable with fsck) and by far more widespread for flash sticks and cards than NTFS.

It's not a pendrive, it's a 2,5'' 200Gb HDD USB. I had to format it to NTFS because i use it for making backups in my wife's business, and you know that M$,s backups are generally quite big, also Window$ doesn't recognize ext3 nativelly. So it was the only option. The real problem is not with HDD itself, but with some files i copied into it through Arch, which became corrupted, and now i'm only looking for a way to delete them, will pass chkdsk on it in my wife's XP laptop...

thestinger wrote:

I've used to have lots of programs with my USB flash drive but I fixed it by giving up FAT32 and formatting it as ext2. Copying files is a lot slower for me in linux than windows in general but it has improved noticeably while I think windows has gotten slower...

You mean problems, right?

Aidenn · 2010-02-10 20:38:02

Luis Sousa wrote:

It's not a pendrive, it's a 2,5'' 200Gb HDD USB. I had to format it to NTFS because i use it for making backups in my wife's business, and you know that M$,s backups are generally quite big, also Window$ doesn't recognize ext3 nativelly. So it was the only option. The real problem is not with HDD itself, but with some files i copied into it through Arch, which became corrupted, and now i'm only looking for a way to delete them, will pass chkdsk on it in my wife's XP laptop...You mean problems, right?

XP can read/write ext2/3, there are services for that and a plugin for Total Commander. :)

and NTFS corruption? sounds really weird. looks more like a problem with ntfs-3g, though I haven't had any ever.

Last edited by Aidenn (2010-02-10 20:38:34)

Luis Sousa · 2010-02-10 21:06:12

Aidenn wrote:

and NTFS corruption? sounds really weird. looks more like a problem with ntfs-3g, though I haven't had any ever.

Yup, didnt believe it either, and assumed it was kernel related or ntfs-3g related. Nevertheless, already chkdsk the HDD with XP and was able to delete all the junk files that were lying there... About ext2/ext3 in XP, what plugins are you talking about? They dont come nativelly, right? I would be interessed in that only if it were a feature that you could enable/disable on no matter what computer with XP, home or pro. If it has the need to install something is no good for me...

Kardell · 2010-02-13 22:00:31

As I remeber that some updates mess WIndows stuff. I had in the past few strange NTFS related behaviours. Very high processor utilisation by ntfs-3g or problems with copying. Now I've noticed that I cannot transfer files from ext3 to fat32 partition on my pen drive. It usually hangs in about half way.
What can I do?
Mount it manually. It doesn't matter Windows or Linux GUI stuff - sooner or later will fail.

Last edited by Kardell (2010-02-13 22:27:38)

king.flasher.dave · 2010-06-11 17:28:31

Hm, the problem still persists. I have it for some months now and it's extremely annoying.
Is there a bug report for the Kernel or something? Does someone actually know what it is about?

I have another machine which I have currently updated (after nearly a year of no updates) and it writes extremely fast.
The laptop I'm currently using has different packages installed but nonetheless was updated more frequently and it copies/pastes extremely slow.

What is this all about?

nstoyanov · 2010-06-12 03:07:06

For me the issue has disappeared (using Xfce). Now when I copy it never speeds up only for the beginning; and when the copy window disappears it takes only a few seconds for the activitiy light to stop and for Thunar to say it is safe to remove. I updated 2 weeks ago when that happened -- Xfce 4.6.2 came out then. Somebody earlier in this thread said that exo ignores the regular mounting policy -- so the problem might be fixed for Xfce only. On a side note, I get about 12 - 14 Mb/s write speed with big files, so do not underestimate the capability of those devices (PatriotXT and Kingston HyperX are two really fast drives that quickly come to mind).

dros · 2010-06-19 00:15:26

I have had this problem for quite some time. The USB drive I am using is a Sandisk 16GiB that has 1 NTFS partition. I use it to transfer very large files to a Wndows system,

Drag and drop copy in Nautilus takes several hours to complete for 4GiB files. After reading the message above I loaded Enlightenment and, voila, the problem is not there anymore.

neoanima · 2010-06-25 14:08:00

this issue is still unsolved definitely. i upgraded to the lastest kernal yesterday, but the copy speed remains slow.

brebs · 2010-06-25 14:35:03

Use the "flush" mount option, with pendrives. Only use the "sync" mount option if you want to KILL ITS PERFORMANCE, and shorten its lifespan

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-537871.html

JackH79 · 2010-06-26 01:19:39

And the problem is not limited to NTFS either. I've got an ext4 external drive that's incredibly slow as well. (See my old post: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=96469). Still no idea what's causing it.
Also, some of my USB-sticks work perfectly fine, whereas others do not. Couldn't determine yet, what the difference is between slow and fast. Because some work and others don't I don't think its got anything to do with flush/sync setting.

shemz · 2010-07-04 11:24:46

On one my laptops with KDE, write speeds are good. On another I use halevt to mount (without -o sync) the speed is comparatively very very slow on the same thumb drive.

brebs · 2010-07-04 11:50:15

So run "mount" by itself on both systems, and see if the mount options it shows you are different at all.

schmoemi · 2010-09-23 21:46:56

Is there a solution yet or, at least, an idea why it's so slow?

lilsirecho · 2010-09-23 23:59:11

Perhaps there is a clue to the problem in the following post:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=104762

k_ibou · 2010-10-20 14:07:53

I start this thread so long ago, I just want to say that I made a fresh install arch and this time installed KDE SC, not all just what I need, and the problem dissapear.

Maybe in my case was a bad configuration or something like that.

Arch Linux

#76 2010-02-09 20:15:05

Re: USB file copy very slow

#77 2010-02-10 06:31:35

Re: USB file copy very slow

#78 2010-02-10 09:08:32

Re: USB file copy very slow

#79 2010-02-10 15:28:28

Re: USB file copy very slow

#80 2010-02-10 15:40:14

Re: USB file copy very slow

#81 2010-02-10 15:54:12

Re: USB file copy very slow

#82 2010-02-10 16:04:00

Re: USB file copy very slow

#83 2010-02-10 18:08:39

Re: USB file copy very slow

#84 2010-02-10 18:13:47

Re: USB file copy very slow

#85 2010-02-10 18:18:21

Re: USB file copy very slow

#86 2010-02-10 18:36:34

Re: USB file copy very slow

#87 2010-02-10 20:38:02

Re: USB file copy very slow

#88 2010-02-10 21:06:12

Re: USB file copy very slow

#89 2010-02-13 22:00:31

Re: USB file copy very slow

#90 2010-06-11 17:28:31

Re: USB file copy very slow

#91 2010-06-12 03:07:06

Re: USB file copy very slow

#92 2010-06-19 00:15:26

Re: USB file copy very slow

#93 2010-06-25 14:08:00

Re: USB file copy very slow

#94 2010-06-25 14:35:03

Re: USB file copy very slow

#95 2010-06-26 01:19:39

Re: USB file copy very slow

#96 2010-07-04 11:24:46

Re: USB file copy very slow

#97 2010-07-04 11:50:15

Re: USB file copy very slow

#98 2010-09-23 21:46:56

Re: USB file copy very slow

#99 2010-09-23 23:59:11

Re: USB file copy very slow

#100 2010-10-20 14:07:53

Re: USB file copy very slow

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