Ubuntu 10.04 64bit and hard disk transfer rate on a Toshiba Satellite P300-19F laptop

[stefanofalone]

Hi everyone,
I would like to know if it is normal to experience 10MB/s data transfer rates during copying between partitions on my local hard drives (Toshiba 250GB 5400rpm SATA) while having three times faster (30MB/s) transfer rates between local partitions and USB drives (Kingston 8GB).

Thank You all very much in advance.

Stefano

[Rubberman]

Sure. Why not? Copying between partitions on the same physical drive will definitely be slower than copying from drive to solid-state device. You have the latency introduced by the drive head seeking, rotational latency, and such. Also, how the target partition is mounted (with or without sync or async options) and how big the drive internal cache buffer is will affect this.

In any case, 10 MBps seems slow (80mbps), as is 30 MBps (240mbps). What is the contents of your /etc/fstab with respect to the local drive partitions, and what file system(s) are you running on them?

[stefanofalone]

Hi,
the file system in my linux partition is ext2.
here follows the content of my fstab. thanks for your time. stef

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=cfad0950-0dbd-4002-85f4-7486cc97ab28 / ext2 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda4 during installation
UUID=0a13c40b-d5a6-4781-abf8-f204e4891c23 none swap sw 0 0

[devils casper]

Do you mount partition of internal Hard disk manually? None of internal partition except / and SWAP listed in /etc/fstab file.

[stefanofalone]

Everytime I boot Ubuntu I get my / automatically loaded. Isn't it correctly listed in the fstab? I can see:

proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=cfad0950-0dbd-4002-85f4-7486cc97ab28 / ext2 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda4 during installation
UUID=0a13c40b-d5a6-4781-abf8-f204e4891c23 none swap sw 0 0

[devils casper]

I would like to know if it is normal to experience 10MB/s data transfer rates during copying between partitions on my local hard drives (Toshiba 250GB 5400rpm SATA)

Only / partition is listed. There isn't any entry for other partitions. Do you have single partition in your Hard disk?
Post the output of sudo fdisk -l command here.

sudo fdisk -l

*Its small L in fdisk -l.

[stefanofalone]

I have two physical drives. One (sda) contains the ext2 linux partition (where / is mounted) and the swap partition.
The other (sdb) contains a NTFS partition where I store data and documents.
Here it follows what the fdisk -l command returns.
Thanks!



Disco /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 byte
255 testine, 63 settori/tracce, 30401 cilindri
Unità = cilindri di 16065 * 512 = 8225280 byte
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Identificativo disco: 0xa9886bf0

Dispositivo Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda3 1 29272 235127308+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 29357 30401 8393962+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disco /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 byte
255 testine, 63 settori/tracce, 30401 cilindri
Unità = cilindri di 16065 * 512 = 8225280 byte
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Identificativo disco: 0x7d666819

Dispositivo Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 30401 244196001 7 HPFS/NTFS

[devils casper]

Create a mount point ( folder ) for NTFS Partition and edit /etc/fstab file.

sudo mkdir /media/data

Add this code at the end of /etc/fstab file

/dev/sdb1     /media/data    ntfs-3g    defaults,umask=0   0   0

Save file and execute sudo mount -a command.

Check the speed of data transfer from and to /media/data (NTFS partition ) and Linux partition.

[stefanofalone]

I did what you suggested but I did not get any change

[stefanofalone]

Hi, I have found that the copy-paste performed on the NTFS partition is carried out at much higher speed (30MB/s, 240 Mbit/s) than that charaterizing the same action performed on the ext2 partition (10MB/s, 80 Mbit/s). Thus, I think that the problem seems to be linked to the linux main partition.
Do you have further suggestions?
Thanks in advance

Stefano