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My whole system slows down when I copy files between an NTFS drive to my local home directory.

This is a new 12.04 installation with the latests 12.8 AMD ATI driver. Using Gnome-Shell or Unity does the same.

Machine Specs:

  • 6 Gigs on DDR1333 RAM
  • 3.2 OCed Core i7
  • 2 HD5850 in Crossfire.

I think the machine should be faster. Doesn't it? How can I improve this?

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  • Try running top in a terminal window while copying, to see if any process users an excessive amount of resources. When was the last time that NTFS file system has been checked? Try running a benchmark read test with the Disk Utility. Sep 9, 2012 at 17:16
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    Pretty sure this is because ntfs-3g is slower than the native filesystem, though I don't have enough information to make an answer. Sep 14, 2012 at 0:39
  • Search this site for "slow copy" and see the many suggestions. The basic problem is that when writes are slower than reads, the system buffers fill up, and drags things to a crawl. These buffers are not associated with the copying process, so when it claims "I'm done", it's really not, so copy speed is inaccurate--copy is only done when system buffers have flushed (watch the blinking light on the target).
    – ubfan1
    Jun 25, 2022 at 15:54

1 Answer 1

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It is hard to help you with so few hardware information...

Do you have several hard disk drives/solid state drives ? Can you tell us its/their make and model ? Are you copying from an USB hard disk drive ? If you launch the "Disk Utility", is/are your hard disk drive(s) healthy (no bad sector, ...) ?

If I were you I would first check that all my drives are healthy with "Disk Utility", then I would perform some read benchmark tests with "Disk Utility". Then I would make some write tests (copy of big files [several GBs] from your home folder to one another folder in your home directory), then from your NTFS partition to your home folder again (big files of several GBs each), ..., to further reduce the list of possible problems.

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  • Total of 4 drives: All Western Digital 3x 1TB and 1x Main 500GB. All healthy with no bad sectors. I have windows 7 installed in dualboot and I dont have any issues with it. Why when copying files the system needs to become sluggish? I dont see the connection.. The speed of the copy is fast about 80MB/s.
    – user85959
    Sep 9, 2012 at 18:42
  • Do you also have the issue (sluggish system) when you perform a copy from ext4 to ext4? Did you recently check your NTFS partition from Windows 7? Can you please post the system load (after the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes) just after a copy of files from NTFS of about 6 minutes? Do you have your /home on the same hard disk drive than the system? Do you use mdadm (RAID 5, 6 or else)?
    – Golboth
    Sep 10, 2012 at 7:44

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