1y ago

Will copying files from one external drive to another create write tasks for my machine internal drive? how does that work?

So, i use linux with kde and was copying some gigabytes of files from a smartphone to a usb device and while doing that the system monitor kept showing that it was writing some mb/s and i got curious, is said writing happening to my ssd or is it just talking about the usb drive?

6 comments

The data should be bypassing your internal disk, though depending on the hardware involved it is possible (yet nowadays unlikely) that this will cause swap to be written to the internal disk.
You can watch which device is being written to using iotop.
- i see, will take a look on what iotop shows next time then, thank you very much!
  
  Could you please give the result here after you checked? I got also curious if it's temporary copied to ram or disk before moving.

For files on your phone transferred via MTP, when you open a file directly, it copies it to a temporary folder then you can play the file or open the document, then delete them after you close/disconnect. So transferring files might copy it to the temp folder on your SSD first before moving it.
- oh, yeah that's a possibility

6 comments