thumb drives, linux and...

[Gillian Densmore]

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.

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[Russell Standish-2]

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


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Visiting Professor of Mathematics      [hidden email]
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