Very slow NTFS wrie preformance

[Boggess Rod]

On 13 December 2010 15:17, stan <stanb at panix.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 03:44:15PM +0000, Colin Law wrote:
>> On 12 December 2010 14:57, stan <stanb at panix.com> wrote:
>> > I have a machiine that I need to write Giagbyte size files from to
a USB
>> > drive. The USB drive is forated as NTFS, and the result needs to be
>> > readable by Windows machies, so I think I am stuck with this
design.
>> >
>> > The writes start of with anticpated times that re reasonable, but
rapidlly
>> > the estimated time climbs to many hours.
>>
>> Have you tried another USB stick?
>>
> Yes, and USB hard drives also. Are you saying you are able to copy
gigabit
> sized files onto NTFS, with aceptable perfromance?

I have not used NTFS with USB, but I have known individual USB sticks
go slow, hence the question.
Have you tried different usb ports?  Sometimes the ones on the front
are different speed to ones on back (if you have both that is).
I am able to dd a 4GB image onto a stick in 10 or 15 mins so you might
like to try dd with an iso image of some sort.  If that also goes slow
then it is not NTFS that is the problem.

I believe there are win drivers for ext3 available, whether they work
on USB I do not know.

Colin

------------------------------

Check out http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net/ for details on speed tests for
USB Thumb-drives. There's a tremendous amount of variation, depending
"... on when the drive was released and what memory was being used from
which manufacturer, but currently the fastest USB 2.0 flash drives on
the market are able to reach read and write speeds of up to 34 and 28
Megabytes per second respectively." [Quoted from this other site:
http://www.everythingusb.com/flash-drives.html#3]

Chances are excellent that this isn't NTFS related (as you suggest), but
hardware related. Unless the user is getting a different performance
profile from NTFS than from ext3. That would be interesting.