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I have a laptop and a desktop computer both running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and I have an issue:

When transfer files from/to USB drives, the speed looks good when the copy starts, but immediately afterwards the speed goes down till a less than 1MB/s. After that, I just stop the operation.

I noticed the above with both PCs but only with some USB sticks. In general the USB filesystem is FAT32 or NTFS.

How can I solve this issue?

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  • Hi, my USB stick is " Kingston DataTraveler R3.0 G2". Is it a bad drive? I read that this stick is for single large files, I didn't expect that with small files was so slow. However with Windows the average speed is about 30 mb/sec so I think that the problem is the OS
    – linofex
    Nov 26, 2015 at 18:49
  • Thank you for your reply. So to have nice performance with ubuntu I have to pay more than 60$ for a stick? At this point is it better an hard drive? EDIT If I change the filesystem of my pen from NTFS to exFAT, will I better performance?
    – linofex
    Nov 26, 2015 at 21:12
  • can you answer my last questions?
    – linofex
    Nov 26, 2015 at 22:16
  • why did you delete your last comment? Please answer my questions, I see that you are an expert. Wuold be important for me
    – linofex
    Nov 26, 2015 at 22:28
  • Good night. I'm off to sleep...
    – Fabby
    Nov 26, 2015 at 22:34

2 Answers 2

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What you're experiencing is the real write speed of cheap MLC USB sticks: The OS starts copying to the cache and then a background process starts copying from the cache to the USB stick.

Once the cache is full, the OS can only add to the cache at the effective write speed of the USB stick, so you will see this happening if you copy:

  1. a single large file
  2. a large number of small files.

Both of which exceed your cache.

The only thing you can do about this is to use more expensive SLC USB sticks.

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  • As you've never accepted an answer on this site before: If this answer helped you, don't forget to click the grey at the left of this text, which means Yes, this answer is valid! ;-)
    – Fabby
    Nov 26, 2015 at 22:35
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I solved the problem formatting my USB in exFat filesystem. If your pc doesn't find the drive, you will have to install exfat-fuse & exfat-utilus from Synaptic Package Manager

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