I have a SLES 11 SP4 system with an external NTFS formatted hard drive attached via USB. I mounted the drive as ntfs-3g. I am trying to copy over approximately 220 GB of data and it is painstakingly show. It is transferring at around 2.0 MB/sec…been running for over six hours now and probably not even 25% completed. Is there anything I can do to improve performance?
Normally when performance to external media is an issue I check first to
make sure the USB ports are not USB 1.1 or even USB 2, or if they are I
expect what I am getting.
Another option, if the disk is slow, then that’s what you get. Does
copying to other things go faster? Does this disk work faster in other
machines, maybe because of faster USB ports? I have an old laptop I hate
to use for copying anything because its USB ports are all older than dirt;
they work so reliably, but they are also reliably slow. Source disks can
also be slow, or slow enough, to make the write seem slow.
It may be worth knowing about the type of data too. One big file should
copy faster than a million files of the same total size. Could you use
tar to sick up all of the input and write it directly to the driver to see
how that goes?
Simple performance tests:
time dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/usb bs=1048576 count=1000 conv=fsync–
Good luck.
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I’m trying to copy backups of Groupwise postoffice and domain directories. Lots of little files. I thought I read somewhere that the issue might be ntfs-3g itself (i.e. a bug). Maybe I’ll try to format the drive with a Linux native format and try again.
bkesting wrote:
[color=blue]
I’m trying to copy backups of Groupwise postoffice and domain
directories. Lots of little files. I thought I read somewhere that
the issue might be ntfs-3g itself (i.e. a bug). Maybe I’ll try to
format the drive with a Linux native format and try again.[/color]
Yes, GroupWise files are problematic! I’d hate to estimate how many of
them are present in 220 GB of data. 
I would consider:
- using an SSD if you have one available
- use a Linux filesystem
- use the “dd” command to transfer the whole 220 GB
- try to use both a 3.1 USB port and a 3.1 USB device.
You will notice quite a difference!
–
Kevin Boyle - Knowledge Partner
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