(Sorry I can’t reply to more than 2 at once because I’m new, so I’m cutting you out Xephon! )
At Xephon: Sadly, you may be correct.
@linux-aarhus Not to be rude, but please reread my post. It is not the cache/buffer. That’s not what I am talking about. I am aware that when dolphin says my transfer speeds are above 100 MB/s that it is merely the buffer filling up. But the emptying of that buffer should be on par with the write speed of the device, which it is not. Compare it to windows, which sustains ~80-100MB/s continuously and is done in a little over an hour.
I double checked your search link, the post that is a few days old here
(I removed link because I cant post it, I’m too new here.)
actually reinforces my point. This is the same issue as mine. 38+ hours for a 274GB transfer at ~5MB/s is insane for USB 3.0, or even 2.0. I mentioned in the OP that on windows it takes maybe an hour and 15 minutes. That is a far cry from 1 and a half days. This must be a bug of some sort. It is also mentioned on Ubuntu and Fedora forums dating back to mid 2000’s which is when I first experienced it.
I read your response here and on that page as well, pointing to modifying the udev rules. Is modifying the udev rules to disable the write-cache the same as shrinking or increasing dirty bytes? I will try it if it might help and will post the results. Is there a way to do it without rebooting? I am on a Live ISO.
@megavolt: I installed iotop and ran sudo iotop -Po (-x errored out as an unavailable command) I did not use dd yet since it is still transferring. I figured it may as well be the same anyway. But I will run dd if you need a comparison of some sort.
Here is the current result and speeds. rsync has been running since about 2 AM here, so 9 hours. Rsync confirms this. It has only transferred 43 GB. When i first got home, it was bouncing between 250-700 KB/s. It’s running around 1.3MB/s at the moment.
(sigh…screenshot removed because I cant post media yet)
here is the copy and pasted outputs of 2 terminals…
iotop:
Total DISK READ : 1235.78 K/s | Total DISK WRITE : 813.52 K/s
Actual DISK READ: 1235.78 K/s | Actual DISK WRITE: 0.00 B/s
PID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO> COMMAND
2310 be/4 root 1235.78 K/s 0.00 B/s ?unavailable? mount.ntfs /dev/sd~mes,uhelper=udisks2
5000 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 813.52 K/s ?unavailable? mount.ntfs /dev/sd~mes,uhelper=udisks2
rsync:
Users/USERNAME/Desktop/New folder/2017-12-01 iphone photos up until 11-30-17/iphone photos up until 11-30-17 12224.JPG
42,766,260,000 24% 1.18MB/s 9:35:39 (xfr#43730, ir-chk=12272/165340)
Users/USERNAME/Desktop/New folder/2017-12-01 iphone photos up until 11-30-17/iphone photos up until 11-30-17 12225.MOV
42,795,718,432 24% 708.32kB/s 52:31:19
I do not know how to use quotes here yet.
At megavolt said:
So you mean then NTFS? It isn’t a surprise to me since NTFS works on user space (ntfs-3g). It is in general slower, same as ext4 driver on Windows.
The drive im transferring from is NTFS, yes. It is an internal SATA drive.
I am transferring to either NTFS external drive over USB 3.0 (internal drive itself is SATA)
OR to a USB 3.0 stick that is exFAT.
I would blame ntfs-3g, but that doesn’t explain the perfect speeds and huge data transfer during the first 30 minutes (up to 70GB.) After which it slows to a crawl.
That is an indicator for an SMR HDD, but can be wrong. CMR HDDs, don’t have that issue.
Again, It also happens with the USB flash drive. Anywhere from 10-70GB at ~80-100MB/s speeds, then a drop to <5MB/s. I believe this plus the fact that windows has no problem at all in either case would rule out SMR.
EDIT: ~80-100MB/s were for the external HDD, not the USB flash drive which is closer to probably 45MB/s on windows
Also cheap fake USB Flash-Drives, which reports more storage, then actually there can be the issue here. It is known that those devices starts fast and when they reach a limit then they transfer in slow speed or even nothing or produce corrupted files after that.
It was a cheap drive (Got it on sale ) and I have bought fake ones before. I had a 128 GB drive that was actually a 16GB flash drive that would “wrap around” and overwrite the beginning, causing some lovely corruption for family photos. This current drive is legit.
Thanks again for the replies everyone. As I’ve said, both the flash and external drive work fine under windows at the proper speeds without any corruption.
Edit: lol my quotes worked