USB 3 portable drive very slow

**kneutron** · May 29th, 2020

--This may be beyond the scope of what you want to do for backups, but the Samsung T5 has a 2TB USB3 model (a bit pricey at over $300 at time of writing) but it's crazy fast. I have 3 of the 500GB models and they're great.

--You may also, if technically inclined, want to look into ZFS (has LZ4 inline compression and snapshots) and mounting a Samba share to back up to over the network instead of formatting as NTFS. I'm willing to help with this as I contribute to the reddit zfs forum as well.

**peyre** · June 17th, 2020

Originally Posted by TheFu

c) Don't use NTFS or non-native file systems. The file system is slow on Linux. Use ext4. Best that is at least 30% faster.

I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier, but this 4TB drive should be plenty big for me to partition into an ext4 for me and an NTFS for the Windows box. I've set up the drive and I'll try out the backup on ext4 tonight.

**HermanAB** · June 18th, 2020

You may also have a power problem with the external drive. Try adding a separate PSU, or a USB hub, with a separate PSU.

**peyre** · June 18th, 2020

It's a portable drive, so about the best I can do is use a Y-splitter, with the power end connected to a USB power adapter. In my tests earlier though, I had roughly equivalent speeds whether I plugged it in directly, plugged it into a Y-splitter with the power end in a USB adapter, or with the power end of the Y-splitter plugged into another USB port on the computer.

I tried this last night. Xubuntu automatically mounted both the ext4 and NTFS partitions. I ran the backup script against the ext4 partition, and the drive kept disconnecting! What the? (I am plugging it into a USB3 extension because I don't want to keep plugging and unplugging from my two precious USB3 ports; I'd rather wear out an extension cable. But the extension cable shouldn't make a difference either.)

**HermanAB** · June 18th, 2020

Is it perhaps an old Seagate drive? Those should not be lightly discarded. They should be thrown. With great force.

**peyre** · June 18th, 2020

No, I have two - one Seagate, one Toshiba (not sure what the manufacturer of the actual drive is). Both are less than a year old.

**peyre** · June 21st, 2020

Ah, I think I got it! It was a difference between the name of the partition and the label of the filing system. It works now - it backs up my system in hours again now, rather than days. So the trick in this case was to use an ext4 partition.