Ubuntu
util-linux package

ext4 file transfer- slow transfers or causes OS to crash

Asked by Imo Ekpo

This happens on a drive that is over 1TB. Whenever I try to transfer huge files from one drive to another, the transfers are really slow and after a couple of hours, the operating system freezes, causing a manual reboot. Even rsync appears slow. The data transfer is from one internal 2TB sata drive to a 1TB internal sata drive.
Is there any solution to this problem or will it be resolved in the next upgrade?
All solutions and attempts are appreciated.

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Chris
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Best Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#1

I think it's a sector translation problem on very large hard drives with new technology that is 4Kb per sector internally.. The solution appears to be in how the drive is partitioned. Ext3 seems to be affected the most, however NTFS can be absolutely appalling - some users finding transfer speeds as low as 1MB/s before system hangs or crashes. Fortunately the solution appears to be fairly simple and just requires the partitions to be aligned with the internal sectors of the physical hard drives.

More information here:

http://linuxconfig.org/linux-wd-ears-advanced-format

It IS an OS problem, but the root cause is how the partition is set up, and how the hard drive does sector translations.

Chris

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marcus aurelius (adbiz) said : 		#2

ext4 is slower than ext3 because of its extensive journaling feature. ext3 is suffient for the majority of uses. i've never had problems with ext3 not being able to recover or start up when my system crashes. you might want to use ext3 instead.

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Imo Ekpo (imoekpo) said : 		#3

Thanks Chris, that solved my question.