copying files (speed)

[Rashkae]

Rick wrote:
> On Sun, 17 May 2009 10:10:29 -0400
> Rashkae <ubuntu at tigershaunt.com> wrote:
> 
>> cd /some/directory/with/3.8G/small/files
>> tar -cf /dev/null .
> 
> I've tried, you command line idea, however...
> it does not display the threw output of the hard,
> there is nothing displayed.  NO MB/s
> 
> I did go very fast on the external usb NTFS drive...
> --
> 
> Please note: this problem is when I drag and drop a folder
> from internal drive to external drive.
> 
> 
> Rick
> 

Ok, then what if you drag and drop a folder from internal drive to
somewhere else on the internal drive.

What I'm trying to determine is if you are running into an index issue.
You said you have 3gb of small files.  If the files are really small,
it's common for a process that tries to read them all do do so very very
slowly on filesystems that use a b-tree index, such as Reiserfs, or ext3
if you add the dir_index option.  (I haven't gotten around to testing
this on EXT4 yet.)  On the other hand, you haven't told us what your
external drive is. Is it a Flash Memory (ie, usb stick), or a hard
drive?   Write speed of only a few MB/s would be typical for a USB flash
 memory type USB stick.. (though you say you get over 20MB/s from
windows, in this case, I would have to be skeptical)

In any case, I've never tried writing a large number of files to an NTFS
drive (or for that matter, writing any files to NTFS at all), but it
wouldn't surprise me if there was some kind of performance issue doing
so... NTFS is not an easy filesystem for open source to reverse engineer
well (Judging simply by how many years it took before we even had beta
quality write ability to the filesystem)