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View Full Version : [ubuntu] USB transfer speed in 11.04



davy jones
July 13th, 2011, 04:48 PM
Can anyone tell me if the problem of slow usb transfer speeds has been resolved in 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)? I am currently using Lucid and facing the problem of slow usb transfer speeds which has always been there in ubuntu but everything else is running just fine for me so I see no reason to upgrade yet unless the new OS has solved this problem.

mikewhatever
July 13th, 2011, 08:16 PM
Are you sure there is an Ubuntu related problem of slow USB transfer speed? If so, can you explain in detail why you think that's the case.

davy jones
July 13th, 2011, 09:21 PM
I have used various pen drives as well as external hard drives and that's the case with all of them so it can't be the drives. I get speeds of around 10-11 mbps with pen drives and around 20 with hard drives. Its pretty slow so around a year ago I started searching the net to find out if there could be something in Ubuntu which causes this and I saw many posts saying that this is a problem which has always been there in ubuntu. So I just want to know if its been resolved in the new OS

mörgæs
July 13th, 2011, 09:33 PM
10-11 mbps is a normal speed for a USB 1 memory stick in Ubuntu. There are many bug reports in Launchpad concerning slow transfers, but they concern much slower speed.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/500069 (and duplicates)

davy jones
July 13th, 2011, 09:38 PM
These are USB 2.0 sticks and drives and my laptop also has USB 2.0. In other OS's USB 2.0 drives have speeds which are several times higher.

mörgæs
July 13th, 2011, 10:27 PM
There are some workarounds here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/177235

Do they help?

mikewhatever
July 13th, 2011, 10:51 PM
I have used various pen drives as well as external hard drives and that's the case with all of them so it can't be the drives. I get speeds of around 10-11 mbps with pen drives and around 20 with hard drives. Its pretty slow so around a year ago I started searching the net to find out if there could be something in Ubuntu which causes this and I saw many posts saying that this is a problem which has always been there in ubuntu. So I just want to know if its been resolved in the new OS

These are more or less the speeds I get in both Ubuntu and WindowsXP. If you want faster transfer speeds, consider switching to USB3 or eSATA.

davy jones
July 13th, 2011, 11:07 PM
There are some workarounds here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/177235

Do they help?

Ok this does not really help because (I know I may sound like a beginner here) there's no "drive" tab when I click on properties in nautilus. But when I look at the drive details in the Disk Utility option in Administration, it says USB 480 mbps.

davy jones
July 13th, 2011, 11:11 PM
These are more or less the speeds I get in both Ubuntu and WindowsXP. If you want faster transfer speeds, consider switching to USB3 or eSATA.

I find that really surprising because I've seen 7-800 mb video files being transferred within a few seconds in Windows XP (USB 2.0)

davy jones
August 21st, 2011, 01:57 PM
I've seen that formatting the drive to a different partition type changes the transfer speed. On a FAT pen drive I was getting speeds of around 10. But I was forced to reformat it to NTFS since it is not possible to transfer files larger than 4 GB in FAT drives and now the transfer speed has gone down to 3-4. Formatting it to EXT4 again gives a speed of 10 but then the drive is not recognized by any other device (such as my BD player). Is there a work around to this?