Copy files - USB external drives

[eliw]

Hiya,

Strange problem here..

WHen I try copy a large number of files from one folder in my main partition to another folder where my external USB drive is mounted the whole process is slow.. really slow - like 9 hours + to copy about 40gb. I simply use gnome copy/paste files to do the copying.

If I do the same thing using windowsXP connected via samba to the same partitions on the Linux box and instruct the copy to go through windows but on the linux box the process is much quicker for exactly the same files... about 3 to 4 hours.

One would have thought the opposite would be right..

Both partitions are formatted using EXT3 by the way...

Can anyone think of why this is the case and anything that might be wrong ?

[eliw]

With no answeres am I to assume that something is wrong here and is local to me ?
Quite bizarre behaviour...

[Kaotik2003]

Well I to have a USB drive but my works fine.

One thing I advise you is to use the command shell to copy the files, maybe it can be faster.

The other thing is the driver configurations. For instants in a drive SCSI (the case of a USB drive) maybe you have to force the driver to use Ultra-SCSI mode that works twice the speed as normal or force Wide-SCSI (16 bits) in devices that have been detected as SCSI-2 (8 bits)

Check the docs of the driver your device is using . Check in /usr/src/linux*/drivers/SCSI, inside the README files.

If the driver is loaded using a module, you can change it /etc/modules.conf or etc/conf.modules

Hope this helps, maybe someone will give more specific info

[eliw]

The thing is tho that the drive is fine as when I use the windowsXP environment to manipulate files through Samba - the speed is acceptable - it is just when I use it through gnome..