slow transfer off main hard drive

[harmankardon35]

I have a 500 gig external usb, and a few 8 gig flash drives. If i copy a file (say a movie or large file) from my primary hard drive (80 gig WD formatted to ext3) to a usb drive it transfers very slowly, about 2 mb/s. But if I copy a file off my secondary internal drive (40 gig seagate formatted to ntfs) it transfers full speed (25-30 mb/s) Its also very slow transfering between internal hard drives (again, no more than 5 mb/s) I checked and as far as i can tell both drives are running in DMA mode. Any reason my primary seems to be causing this bottleneck? it seems to preform fine otherwise (as it is the drive with my ubuntu installation on it)

thanks

[mehdar]

can you please run the following two commands in your terminal :
and paste them here ;

df -h
fdsik -l

[harmankardon35]

I think i have it fixed....I edited hdparm.conf to enable write caching and set DMA mode 3 as opposed to dma mode 1. Its still only about 6 mb/s but thats twice as fast as the previous 3 mb/s average. Also, that second command can not be found but here is the results of the first:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 71G 31G 37G 46% /
udev 865M 264K 865M 1% /dev
none 865M 676K 864M 1% /dev/shm
none 865M 196K 865M 1% /var/run
none 865M 0 865M 0% /var/lock
none 865M 0 865M 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sdb1 37G 6.0G 29G 18% /media/67acb697-8470-4f02-8a41-b0b96228af9c

[oz]

can you please run the following two commands in your terminal :
and paste them here ;

df -h
fdsik -l

Also, that second command can not be found

mehdar's second command above has a typo in it and should have been as follows:

fdisk -l

[mehdar]

mehdar's second command above has a typo in it and should have been as follows:

fdisk -l

Thank you Ozar,
You are absolutely correct.

Please also type the command :
cat /etc/fstab

and post content here.

Thank you