For context:
I’m copying the same files to the same USB drive for comparison from Windows and from my Fedora 41 Workstation.
Around 10k photos.
Windows PC: Dual Core AMD Athlon from 2009, 4GB RAM, old HDD, takes around 40min to copy the files to USB
Linux PC: 5800X3D, 64GB RAM, NVMe SSD, takes around 3h to copy the same files to the same USB stick
I’ve tried chagning from NTFS to exFAT but the same result. What can I do to improve this? It’s really annoying.
That’s nice but I managed to copy 300GB worth of data from the Windows PC to my Linux PC in around 3h to make a backup while I reinstall system and now I’ve been stuck for half a day copying the data back to the old Windows PC and I’ve not even finished 100GB yet… I’ve noticed this issue long ago but I ignored it as I never really had to copy this much data. Now it’s just infuriating.
One thing I ran into, though it was a while ago, was that disk caching being on would trash performance for writes on removable media for me.
The issue ended up being that the kernel would keep flushing the cache to disk, and while it was doing that none of your transfers are happening. So, it’d end up doubling or more the copy time because the write cache wasn’t actually helping removable drives.
It might be worth remounting without any caching, if it’s on, and seeing if that fixes the mess.
But, as I said, this has been a few years, so that may no longer be actively the case.
This actually sounds like it could be the case, I’ll explore tomorrow as I’m already in bed. Thanks for suggestion.
Edit: disabling caching yielded an improvement but very minor, writing to USB stick still sucks
Are you using two separate devices? If so another option could be LocalSend, it allows you to send files over the same network.
I used it for sending a couple hundred GBs of files. Didn’t take too too long. Also avoids unnecessary writes to flash media.
