Whenever I copy files from really anywhere, my hard drive to someone else’s, another laptop, external hard drive internal hard drive, I really doesn’t matter what I copy to, it starts out fast, on my hard drive I’ll get speeds about 50mb a second, and that will last for a minute or to and then the speed will simply die, slowing to anywhere from 25mb a second to a crawl of 3mb a second.
Also I will end up having random programs freeze for no reason, from dragging mp3s into the media player ( which wont play them and I can’t seem to find the right codecs ) even if I don’t do that and just start the system monitor, and go to the main tab, it will freeze, firefox, might freeze if I try to close the download window.
My computer’s specs:
hard drive 1: 7200rpm, 500gb, 450gb raid partition, roughly 50gb not formatted
hard drive 2: 7200rpm, 750gb, 450gb raid partition, 15gb /boot partition, the rest not formatted.
Raid 0 on both 450gb raid partitions, with ext4 mount point: /
GFX Card: Nvidia 9600 gso
Cpu AMD Athlon 5000+ Black Edition Dual core
4gb of ram at 800mhz
My windows hard drive is 320 gb with one ntfs partition. 7200rpm
64bit version of OpenSuSE
This is normal, it is related to filling up and emptying of buffers that takes place during copying. The OS and hardware are trying to do their best to support quickest copying with the best use of resources.
When copying large files, what matters is average speed. If you copy a huge file, say 4.7 GB, you should get data transfer rate ( = write speed) around 20-30 MB/s. If you get less speed on modern hardware, then there is error somewhere.
Copying a bunch of small files and folders is a different issue. Usually the speed is lower.
Thanks, Yha when, Im copying files it’s usually a bunch of cd and dvd images, which can be up to a hundred gb, but I found if I plug one of my fast drive into a usb port the job gets done at roughly 35 40 mb instead of slowing all the way down to 5 or 10mb/s. Thats at least good to know, my windows computer doesn’t have nearly as close of file transfer speeds, but I was just wondering if there was any way to improve upon it.
You cannot do much to improve. However, the speed in Windows shall be the same.
To accelerate copying a little, you can connect the HD - the one that is inside the enclosure - via eSATA or SATA connector. You have to open the enclosure of a USB hard drve for that.
Use a short, high-quality USB cable. Use the power supply if possible.
Use ext4 filesystem, or learn which one is good for large files.
Disable time stamps in mounting if you can.
You can fine tune filesystem options.
All these, however, will have small effect on speed.
