Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
Strange thing is copying files from my sd card through my phone plugged directly to my old laptop drive using a Ubuntu live disk goes fast at first like 50MB/s then slows down really slow to as 1MB/s and half the time quits. And it appears disconnecting my phone then reconnecting it resolved this temporary fatigue then I can try again about about a gig at a time. I wonder if this is a symptom of using the external hard drive which sounds like it has to wind into gear everytime I do anything.
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
A detailed description of your hardware might help.
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
What specs are you looking for? It's an old 2011 laptop, 1ghz, 4gb ram.
Are you familiar with this "fatigue" symptom?
Right now I'm getting a steady 550kB/s. Slower than the SD card in the phone, the phone's USB 3.0, and the laptop's USB 2.0. So IDK what else could be the bottleneck in there
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
Well, the interesting information would be your laptop HDD, your external HDD and the interface to it. USB2 can be many things.
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
I think it has to do with buffers.
When you first start the transfer, buffers are empty so it appears the transfer is fast. After they fill up then transfer speed slows down because the buffers are emptied by the system at a slower speed due to some of the reasons discussed in #3 & #4, and possibly other things too.
Does that make sense, or did I just confuse everyone?
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
Oh sorry, not "external hard drive" but external DVD drive. Whatever. It's slow. Buffers? I think I understand.
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
Another thing to think of. If it's thousands of tiny files it will be much slower than one big massive file. I'm not educated enough to explain the why behind this, just know that it does matter.
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
"External DVD drive"?
Of course it's slow. It needs to burn a DVD, this takes some time. The fast burst you see at the beginning is the RAM buffers filling up, then it's down to DVD write speed.
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
I'm not reading or writing from it though. I'm just using it to run the live ubuntu DVD
Re: Why does my data transfer speed start fast then taper down?
I'm sorry, but you've lost me. Try rephrasing the whole issue so it's understandable.