Does KDE makes file transfers between hard drives slower? My laptop is too slow when copying files to my usb flash drive.
I have two laptops, I'll call them laptop 1 and laptop 2.
Laptop 1 is my gaming laptop, and laptop 2 is a very low-spec one that I use as a jellyfin server. Here's the neofetch result for both of them:
Laptop 1
Laptop 2
The problem
On both of them, I copied a 5GB folder from the laptop to my 3.0 usb flash drive, I used this rsync command on each:
rsync -a --progress folder_path destination_folder_path
Laptop
Average transfer speed
Laptop 1
9MB/s
Laptop 2
45MB/s
How is this possible? The Laptop 1 is way superior than laptop 2. The laptop 1 has an nvme SSD while laptop 2 has an old 320GB HDD, yet the transfer speed difference is insane.
Does KDE affect the folder copying somehow? If I copy a file on the same SSD on laptop 1, the speed reaches more than 400MB/s.
It's hard to be completely sure with USB. I think if you can identify the controller, you should be reasonably sure it's actually USB 3 (but then you've got the various flavours of USB 3).
You can browse the output of lspci which should tell you the capabilities of your controllers. In theory.
The speed of file transfer operations can be affected by a variety of things, CPU load, storage device load, temperature, file system, device protocol (USB/PCIE/SATA).
Oh yeah, Baloo can do wierd things. Shouldn't be related tho.
I'm down to help. You should investigate whether the USB standard being used is different, though both those speeds should be possible whether it's usb 3 or 2.
I assume the difference is consistent? Same files, same drive, same thing every time?
What's it rated for? If you use something like hdparm to benchmark it on each laptop, are the results wildly different?
The gnome disks tool also has drive benchmarking if you prefer a GUI.
Speculating is great for troubleshooting. Every time someone speculates a possible cause, it’s possible to devise a way to test it. It’s called hypothesising. Each tested hypothesis, regardless of the actual results, helps to further the understanding of the problem.