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Trying to backup data from hard drive before reloading windows following some issue with its load.

Having trouble with the file transfer to a USB3/2 external hard drive NTFS. Getting transfer speed of about 116.7kB/sec. In other words its taking about 5 hours to transfer 1.4GB. I've got about 80GB to go. So the transfer is going to take 11days. Seems a little on the slow side.

Am I missing something? Is there a way to make this faster. No issue with the external drive transferring this amount in windows. But don't have that option at the moment.

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I have the same problem if my drive got errors. After correcting errors with chkdsk in win my drives are often fast again. But win might remove some files while fixing the drive. But win just moves them to another folder - which name I cannot rmemeber richt now. Have you checked the drive in win for errors? – Peterling Sep 17 '12 at 22:57
Please do the following. 1) Disconnect your hard drive. 2) Open a terminal and do sudo tail -n 0 -f /var/log/syslog. 3) Connect your hard drive. 4) Copy some files to it for about a minute or so. 5) Stop the tail process (Ctrl+C). 6) Copy&Paste the full output of the terminal here or on paste.ubuntu.com. – gertvdijk Sep 17 '12 at 23:12

2 Answers

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It seems like the drive has mounted as a USB 1.0 device. Is it plugged into a USB 3.0 port?

I've seen problems with USB 3.0 that when you unmount them from the launcher they will re-mount again after several seconds. If you then try to use the device it may run very slowly. After investigation I found that it was because the device was remounting as a USB 1.0 device. I can't seem to find the bug report at the moment.

If this is the case, remount the drive again after removing it completely from the system - physically unplug it and try again.

If you are using a USB 3.0 port try a USB 2.0 port. Try different USB 2.0 ports if the problem persists.

It's still going to take a little while to move 80Gb, but not 11 days!

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Changed the usb port. Improved for awhile to 350kB/s, but has since gone way back down to 49kB/s. Haven't disconnected the drive since. Getting a few I/O errors copying certain random files across. – JMP Sep 16 '12 at 11:56
It seems there is a problem with the USB hardware, or the way in which the communication is being done to the hardware. Have a look in /var/log/syslog to see if there's any clues about possible problems relating to the USB. In particular I'd be looking for clues to how the device is being recognised. Plugging the device in should trigger a series of events that will get logged. – fabricator4 Sep 18 '12 at 19:59
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Had to move extras to secondary usb card slot. Drive is faster when it is not sharing connections with kbd mouse bluetooth etc.

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