I’ve had this issue since the first day I started using linux about 15 years ago. Always the same issue, transfers start fine and slows down to a crawl, only on USB sticks.

The USB sticks are fine, I can make bootable sticks in five minutes but if I copy a file of similar size to them is half an hour and then five to ten more minutes waiting to be able to safely remove the drive.

There are dozens of forum posts, some blaming the drives, others the GUI, dirty buffers, outdated kernels, fastboot for some reason. Others marked as solved without a solution because it magically solved itself.

  • D_Air1@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Less, I also have this but with different numbers. The simplified answer is that the transfer speed that you are seeing isn’t the actual speed that it is transferring to the disk in the first place. Instead it is the speed of it being cached into ram, before tapering off to actual write speeds. The defaults work on most machine, but there isn’t a one size fits all value. You may find that playing around with those numbers causes more stable write speeds because it will force the system to actually write the data to the usb stick instead of letting large amounts of data cache into ram before actually writing it out to disk. This is often the reason why when it says it is done writing it isn’t actually done writing and you have to wait some minutes on some systems to be able to eject. In fact, a lot of times on machines that experience this problem. Hitting the safely eject button is what forces it to immediately write all data to disk.

    I believe there was an article about it that I can’t seem to recall the name of, but I believe it was something along the lines of “your operating system is lying to you” or something like that.

    • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      there’s a thing that drives me nuts with linux, i really wish it showed actual progress. are you aware of a way?

      i once sat for like 30 minutes waiting for the actual write to finish after unmounting. makes me want to disable caching altogether.

      • D_Air1@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        The command I used before changing the defaults was this sync && watch -d grep -e Dirty: -e Writeback: /proc/meminfo

        That should show you the progress. It should be going down as it is being written to disk.