Comment 28 for bug 334914

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alex123 (stry90dis) wrote : Re: [jaunty] usb file transfer is very very slow

Well since I figured dstat doesn't do any harm I attached my USB HDD, right clicked on properties in /media/disk which is the USB HDD while running a dstat trace. The only thing it does is count files and the space they use.
On this disk there are 28329 items totalling 325,6 GB. Files are documents, mp3's, videos ranging from a few KB to a few GB. Guesstimated average read speed is 40kB/s

Results are in dstat_USB_HDD_count_files.log

Next I copied an ubuntu ISO to the disk 699,0 MB. The first 204,9 MB went blazingly fast (few seconds). dstat didn't record anything being written to the disk. Then nautilus progress window stopped at 204,9 MB for a few minutes and dstat shows data being written at around 1300kB. After a while the nautilus window started progressing blazingly fast again to ~424MB and stopped again for a few minutes, dstat output still running along at ~1300kB. After a while nautiles progresses again blazingly fast to the end and the progress indicator window is closed. After this dstat output indicates it is still running along at 1300kB for a few minutes.

In the log of dstat, after the first 3-5 lines or so I started writing the file to the disk. You'll see nothing is actually written first, but the nautilus windows indicates this is being done. Wild guess, it caches every ~205 MB first?

Log is called dstat_USB_HDD_copy large_file_to.log

Next I copied a 623,5MB avi file that is on the USB HDD to my desktop. Constant speed of ~670kB right from the beginning according to dstat, also according to the nautilus window. When the nautilus progress window closed, dstat also showed no reading from the USB disk was done anymore.

Log is called dstat_USB_HDD_copy large_file_from.log

Attached are the dstat logs, kernel logs etc. Nothing special, they are the added bits of the logs posted above because somehow the other entires were removed. at around 20:15 you'll see alot could not enumerate etc... this is when I had that USB bluetooth 2.0 dongle plugged in,unplugged it around that time. So it has no (direct) link to the USB HDD.

Added the logs to a .tar.gz to prevent clutter here.