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I'm trying to move files from an SSD to an HDD on Ubuntu 20.04, but the transfer speeds are extremely slow.

After half an hour, only 1.3 GB has been copied.

My research hasn't helped, most solutions I found discuss network or USB issues, which don't apply here.

  • SSD: 500GB, ext4, boot drive, 95% use

  • HDD: 2TB, ext4, mounted on /media/disk

I attempted several solutions.

  • Dropping the ram cache (The system is using 28.5GiB of cache out of 31.1 avaliable), but the drop does not work and hangs forever. Using this solution
  • Using ionice through iotop to increase priority, which helps.
  • Using rsync instead of cp

No matter what i try, i only get at best 2.5MBps on average. Considering that 99% of the files are 3.5MB and above, i think that the transfer speed should be much faster.

I have a Seagate ST2000DM008 7500rpm 2TB hdd.

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  • How are the disks connected exactly? The SSD is likely SATA and not the bottleneck. What about the HDD? USB? If USB, USB 1.0, 2.0, 3.0? The mount point really isn't interesting at all... What does "nmon" (for example) show while you're transferring files? Commented Dec 5, 2024 at 16:55
  • You should also be exact with your units. Usually "B" denotes a byte, and "b" a bit, especially when talking about communication speeds. Is your 2.5 Mbps megaBYTES or megaBITS per second? Commented Dec 5, 2024 at 17:00
  • @Hans-MartinMosner The SSD is connected to a m.2 slot but i think it is a SATA interface, either way it shouldn't be the bottleneck. The HDD is internal and connected through SATA. Regarding nmon output (thanks for the new tool i discovered) i see varying read and writes speed of around 600KB to 35MB with frequent stops. The Busy column often goes past the 100% limit on the HDD. Overall the maximum speed is within the range of what i expect but it seems like it very frequently stops, dropping the average transfer rate. Commented Dec 5, 2024 at 17:31
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    @Hans-MartinMosner I updated the units according to the exact letters used by the diagnostic tools i have. Commented Dec 5, 2024 at 17:34
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    taking a wild guess: the device you're copying to is formatted as NTFS? That's not an extremely well-supported file system on linux, and Ubuntu 20.04 is very very old, so that it only has an obsolete and very slow driver for it. Commented Dec 5, 2024 at 21:27

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