FFS very slow. Other ways to copy 1.2TB of files?

[m3110w]

I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 on a laptop. Earlier today I started a FFS mirror job of my 1.2TB user files to an external USB-C connected spinning hard drive. FFS says the job will take 30 days. !!!! Also, while FFS was running, I was unable to start any other apps on my 40GB-RAM Ryzen 7 laptop. So naturally I stopped the FFS job. My main drive is a laptop internal 2TB nvme.

Is there a faster way to copy files to an external USB-C connected spinning hard drive? Should I use an USB-C connected external nvme drive instead? (I'll buy one if needed to get decent copy times.)

I'm thinking if I find a a faster way to copy files to the external drive, I'll use FFS to sync future jobs (which will be small and go very fast).

[xCSxXenon]

SSDs will be faster than a spinning hard drive

[m3110w]

Yes, I'm now researching that option. Looks like the way to go.

[therube]

says the job will take 30 days

Obviously that cannot be correct (hopefully).

while FFS was running, I was unable to start any other apps

I'd be more concerned about that, why that was the case?
What was CPU usage during this time?

Pick a sampling of files & let FFS copy them to the external drive.
What kind of actual throughput are you getting?

Take the same set of files & copy them again, this time using cp -r (or some other utility on Linux).
What kind of actual throughput are you getting?

If it is the same, then likely nothing to do on the FFS end.


A slug of an external drive might just be a slug of a drive.
Perhaps a different drive (or different format, SSD) may give better throughput.

[Flowers4]

I'm using nvme ssds now exclusively.

Just remember that if your computer doesn't have the internal hardware required to transfer at the faster speeds that these drives are capable of you will not see any advanced performance. I have pcie 3 and 4 in my computers, along with usb-c connectors.

My one older laptop that only has uSB 3 and older internal architecture only gets about 35 MB per second transferring to my super fast external hard drives.

The same hard drive when connected to my newer computers with the USBC and PCIe 3 and 4I get about 500 megabytes per second!

This software from https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html will tell you if your computer has pci-e 3 or 4.

[therube]

(My end says, PCI-Express 3.0 (8 GT/s).
I don't have (external) NVMe nor USB-C.
I do have, "supposedly", USB 3, of some sort, & a "flash" drive.
I get nowhere near 1 GB/s transfers ;-).)

[m3110w]

I got FFS working now. I was going thru an Anker USB3 powered hub. That used to work for FFS syncs but apparently not anymore. I'll have to research why. I connected the HDD directly to my USB3 laptop and it worked. Took 16 hrs to do an initial first sync of 1.2TB of data to an empty HDD. Of course, once the first sync is done the subsequent syncs are a few seconds.

I was not able to determine why the earlier FFS sync froze my system cuz I was unable to start the SysMon app or any other app.

Issue resolved (mostly).

[m3110w]

How do I mark this issue as resolved?

[xCSxXenon]

How do I mark this issue as resolved?

You don't, it's just an open-ended thread. Although, it would be kind of cool to have something like GitHub/Microsoft where there is a dedicated page to issues and then each can have a jump-to link that goes to and highlights the answer.