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Whenever I transfer large files, or large amounts of files, over USB to or from an external drive, the whole computer slows down to a crawl during the transfer. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, but I've had this problem before in earlier versions. Why does this happen? I want to be able to file a bug report to stop this from happening.

Cheers,
Reid

user155708
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2 Answers2

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This sounds like a classic case of system load to me.

When you read/write something to/from a drive, it needs to lookup file information. However, that file may be fragmented, in different locations, or even organized.

When you copy something from your drive to a USB, you have to read a (potentially) fragmented file and then re-write it to another storage medium. With some systems (read EXT), it is often faster than other systems (cough NTFS cough). Also, if you have a bad processor, it wastes cycles for other things trying to copy things over.

There is really nothing you can do to solve this issue. There are workarounds, however:

  1. Defragment your hard drive.
  2. Use an EXT formatted flash drive where possible.
  3. Install more memory as a "cache" space.
    1. Use excess memory as a ramdisc.
  4. Use a better USB protocol.
  5. Upgrade your processor/PC.
  6. Get an SSD.
Kaz Wolfe
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Here is what you can do (not a solution but a workaround till you resolve the issue):

1) Find out which process is hogging CPU when you copy large files (may be Nautilus / Thunar etc). You can use top or htop to find it.

2) Install cpulimit by issuing sudo apt-get install cpulimit

3) Limit the process found in Step 1 like this

cpulimit -e thunar -l 30

We are throttling the CPU usage by the process thunar restricting it to use 100 % of your CPU and bring your machine to a standstill. You should be doing this only when you initiate a large file transfer / copy.

Let know if this works.

Horizon
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