It takes 10 minutes to write 3GB and then 5 more minutes for the do not unplug
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Yes. Use faster USB drives. If your computer has USB3 ports, buy USB3-specific flash drives.
Better yet, skip flash drives altogether and get a compact USB SSD. They come is the same small sizes as a flash drive and are MUCH faster.
Both port and usb flash drive are usb3
How old is the drive and how is it formatted? You’re gonna want ExFAT for the best performance with large files.
Try wiping the drive, creating a new GPT partition table and formatting with ExFAT. If that doesn’t improve performance, then it may just be the flash drive. I find that the drives that advertise their speeds tend to be faster than the drives that don’t, and I get the BEST performance from SSDs. I now have a pile of old flash drives that I no longer use because they are so slow.
Also, large flash drives (128GB, 256GB) tend to be a LOT faster than small ones. And as the drive nears it’s capacity, write speeds will start to slow down dramatically.
In this case it’s a 64GB datatraveler I bought a few years ago and I barely used.
This is not a new issue, since I started to use linux I always experienced this very slow transfers, at first I blamed my old PCs but now I in this same computer running windows all flash drives were much faster than this.
I tried to google for a solution, there are dozens of forum posts going back years, with as many solutions and workarounds, none of them seemed to be persistent.
that is one of the small ssds they were talking about, that is not a flash drive. i dont have much advice but hopefully that will help you look for answers.
edit: maybe not, that could just be the datatraveler max. there is quite a bit of specific information on datatravelers though.
I too would be interested in this - though I also noticed it was worse in some formats than others i.e a FAT32 USB stick took ages, but the same one formatted as something else (might have been EXFAT or NTFS) was significantly quicker.
In my experience ext4 was the worst of all
I have issues with a portable SSD that transfers large files quickly and if you click unmount, it unmounts quickly, but if you plug it in again, the file will show 0B, despite saying 600MB before hitting unmount. Doesn’t happen with small files, I learned that I just need to leave it plugged in for a few minutes after transfer before I unmount.
It is an old SSD that still has NTFS and I would have made it into an Ext4 partition as I don’t use windows anymore, but I don’t want to move around terabytes of data to achieve this.
Before anyone says anything, it is used to transfer files from a computer, that currently doesn’t have WiFi and where cellular is bad, to my NAS at home, so I technically have 3 copies, with one copy being correct, while the other 2 might be corrupt 0B files… I try to be vigilant till construction is done and we get WiFi.
This is because there is a DRAM cache. The drive writes to the cache then sends it to the NAND. If you disrupt this the drive will have data written but the last step is the drive writing the file location file for the drive. The drive sends the OS a signal stating the job is complete. Only then is it safe to remove/unmount
When it takes a while for the do not unplug, it’s usually because it’s just still writing data. The loading bar you see is actually writing to a cache. If you run sync after copying the data, you’ll probably find that it finishes at the same time that it says it’s safe to unplug. The easy solution is to just get faster / nicer USB drives - check reviews for benchmarks if you can find them.
