Slow usb speeds

General system Newbie
1

I have been having an issue for a while now, and decided to come here for help.

I cannot figure out why usb speeds slow to a crawl. I was trying to download Snappy Driver Origin (to get driverpacks to install on a windows machine that is offline) which I have used for probably 2 decades and it is a 40~GB download. When transferring it to the usb drive, the transfer drops to an abysmal <1Mbps transfer speed. Doesnt matter if its 2.0 or 3.0 usb devices or ports.

I have seen this before, MANY times. Thats why Im asking here. I asked once on Manjaro, and lets just say they removed my solution… :melting_face: (I just used windows as I was dual booting at the time, it was a 200GB hard drive copy I was moving via usb)

link to it:https://forum.manjaro.org/t/slow-usb-transfers/146863

I’m not bashing manjaro, they did try to help. This issue crops up on every major distro I’ve come across. Doesnt matter the hardware, or the usb drive whether is flash or HDD. They couldn’t replicate the issue, and somehow also did not have any similar equipment to test with. (2.0 or 3.0 usb flash/HDD drives)

When I say slow, I mean hours for a few GBs to actual days if its a few more GBs. I’ve searched elsewhere on google, it pops up everywhere and no one can find the answer. There is a linux mint post here:https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=387874 They eventually decide its not a linux issue but busted hardware, despite the user clearing the tests–they do hint that it -may- be a bug in the kernel, which I also suggested in my manjaro forum post. It gets repeated as far back as 2014 on ubuntu forums, so the issue is not new.

THE TEST: Transfer a large amount of data to a usb drive. Doesn’t matter if its a flash or HDD drive. It’s not a cache issue or a “reporting the wrong speed issue” or a thermal issue. My 40GBs of data ran for 5 hours before I unmounted the drive, to find it had wrote about 6GB. Just 6. Its not thousands of small files either, just a few that a 1-3GB in size.

Can anyone else replicate this? I am a newbie when it comes to linux, but i’ve had this problem off and on for as far back as I can remember.

Edit: forgot to mention it seems to occur after 30 seconds to a minute or two of transferring. Sorry for the blogpost but I had to add some backstory. :slight_smile:

2

Please provide output of inxi -Fzxxx with all relevant USB devices attached.

No I can not. I am using usb devices as my backup and I frequently transfer GB / TB of data via USB without any performance issue.

3

Having done fairly large transfers to USB drives on Linux, this isn’t a problem of Linux, but more likely a problem of specific hardware, at least from my experiences in the past.
That isn’t to say that it’s impossible that the current kernels might not have a problem, but they worked fine back in the 5. and early 6. eras.

4

A lot more information is needed. I mean first What DE is this happening in? How are you doing the copy? What other processes are running at the time? What filesystem?

I regually copy large files between the computer and USB thumb drives and hard drives. While the speed is always faster going to another hard drive the thumb drives can take much longer to write.

When ever I copy large files I go straight to the command line. Doing it this way for years and never an issue. Much less on the resources and its faster.

If copying from a Linux Device to a NTFS device can take quite a long time itself. I think this is more because of the way Microsoft does things vs the way linux does things (data storage).

5

It has spanned back for over a decade that i can recall. Thats the problem, unless someone can see it for themselves its impossible to diagnose.

Any DE, though I mostly use KDE. Copy method doesnt seem to matter, happens in dolphin file manager or through terminal with copy command. What ever other processes exist during runtime, I can’t possibly list that. As far as filesystems go, this is one that seems it might have something to do with it (as a lot of people immediately jump on the NTFS/windows hate wagon,) but it doesnt seem to matter what filesystem. I’ve tried dozens of variables, ext3-4, ntfs, exfat, etc on usb 2.0 and 3.0, flash drive or HDD, to the same avail. Works at first, followed by slowdown, followed by a crawl.

The only OS i tested that worked was FerenOS, and that test even spanned multiple machines both desktop and laptop (from 2009ish to a 2022 dell laptop) I have been thorough doing tests like this before, the problem is getting someone with more knowledge than me to investigate it with similar hardware. The current two pc’s im having an issue with are a ryzen 1800x with x370 asrock board and an ancient inspiron 560 with a broke ethernet adapter. I tried 4 different 128GB 3.0 sticks and a 3.0 HDD before i finally just opened Snappy drivers using WINE (i love WINE :smiley: ) and downloaded the drivers into a folder and shared the folder over a network, which worked fine of course. Hilariously enough, using a usb to ethernet adapter.. so once again im not sure why the problem affects drives and not a usb to ethernet adapter which functioned up to a continuous 8MBps (100Mbps) which took about a reasonable hour.

I first noticed the issue when creating live iso files on usb drives using linux. I had a 4GB flash drive that i regularly reinstalled windows with, and knew it took a solid 20 minutes to copy over to the drive. But when using linux as a daily driver on another pc, I could never get it to copy and would just pull the drive and reformat it in frustration and use another windows pc to make the live iso again. That was 10 years ago at least, I remember slipstreaming drivers onto the windows iso lol as it wouldnt boot via usb.