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Every time I send files (almost 1-2GB movies) to my parents' pendrives I'm about to fall asleep. It's not pendrives fault because the other Windows laptop transfers at a fair USB 2.0 speed...

I always send them through Nautilus: from 0 to 100 in seconds, then it gets stuck and remains for about 5-10 minutes, when it finally completes. It never occurs when I'm using 3.0 devices, speed is ok.

I really think that's Nautilus fault, maybe connected to my architecture, I don't know, but that's really frustrating. Is there something I can do?

EDIT: I just tried sending the same file through Nautilus and then with cp /source-path/source-file /dest-part/dest-file as suggested by @Bob91 and I found that it seems to take the same time to transfer 1.5GB (~4-5 minutes), so we can exclude Nautilus.

EDIT 2: @sudodus You turned on my light bulb, so I did a benchmark in both laptops (Windows vs Ubuntu): I tested my parents' Sony & Sandisk 2.0, my old Sony 3.0 and my WD external HDD and result in write speed surprised me: we have about 4-5MB/s for the 2.0 drives, a sad 7MB/s for my old Sony 3.0 and a good 68-70MB/s for my external HDD.

According to @vidarlo:

The reason it show a quick progress is memory caching. The file is only written at the end of the copy process, which tricks the UI into believing that copying is further along than it actually is.

Thanks everyone. I'm going to buy decent pendrives for my parents' birthday 😂

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3 Answers 3

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It's probably crappy USB drive. Cheap USB drives have a write speed of <15MB/s, some as low as 1-2MB/s. Want faster? Buy an more expensive one.

10 minutes for 2GB works out to approx. 3.3MB/s, which is reasonable for a cheap drive.

The reason it show a quick progress is memory caching. The file is only written at the end of the copy process, which tricks the UI into believing that copying is further along than it actually is.

(As a sidenote: I've even seen drives advertised as USB 3.0... and 5MB/s write speed!)

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    Well, I wrote that on Windows speed is completely different with the same pendrives, like 1 minute vs 10 minutes. So I don't think it's pendrive (every damn 2.0 pendrive) fault...
    – np_3ka
    Jan 9, 2019 at 17:23
  • Is your Windows on the same laptop? If not how can it be compared. May be some hardware or driver problem.
    – Vijay
    Jan 9, 2019 at 17:31
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    @Vijay Nope, it's my parents' laptop, with low specs compared to mine. I struggle to believe that their old and cheap laptop can trasfer at a higher speed than mine... Also, I had Windows here, I didn't have transfer speed problems.
    – np_3ka
    Jan 9, 2019 at 17:35
  • @nplezka, Are you sure that Windows reports when it has flushed the buffers? My experience is that many USB pendrives are very slow, but you can get much faster USB 3 pendrives, when you know which ones to select. See this link and links from it, help.ubuntu.com/.../FromUSBStick#Notes_about_speed. After using a pendrive for some time, it becomes slower, and you can make it fast again by writing zeros to the whole drive.
    – sudodus
    Jan 9, 2019 at 19:47
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    @sudodus you turned on my light bulb, so I did a benchmark in both laptops:
    – np_3ka
    Jan 9, 2019 at 20:40
3

try to copy files from the command line to know if nautilus faults

cp /source-path/source-file /dest-part/dest-file
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0

I had this problem for years with all kind of usb sticks (no matter 2.0 or 3.0), formatted as fat32 (mostly), but sometimes also ntfs.

After trying to improve Mac access to my Linux sticks I have started using exFAT format, and now I see what I consider normal speed (like in Windows, without a lag at 99% etc).

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