How do I get better USB transfer speeds in (X)ubuntu?

Solution 1:

The article Slow USB 2.0 mass storage transfer rate suggests that this might be a problem of the device getting mounted by default with the sync option :

Do you have a "Devices" Icon on your Desktop?
If so, open it. If not, try opening media:/ in konqueror.

Selct the device then -> Properties -> Mounting(tag) and uncheck the Synchronous box. (This gets remembered, so you should only need to do it once per-device).

Some more ideas come from the bug-report Write through on external hdd making writing very slow

• you change to async at runtime by 'sudo mount -o remount,async /dev/sda1' (or whatever your mounted partition(s) is/are)
• you create an fstab entry for sda which mounts it async (this requires that the device is always plugged in at boottime)
• you change 'sync' to 'async' in the pmount source and rebuild the package

See also the discussion in the article as regarding pmount, if this applies to your system.

Another magic solution comes from USB 2.0 slow write but fast read, solution yet? and involves re-mount:

When I mount a USB drive on /dev/sdc1 with the following line

/dev/sdc1       /mnt/sdc1     auto    sync,noauto,user,exec     0       0

in /etc/fstab, and try to copy a 5.2 MB file to the drive from the local hard disk, then after an entire minute, 244 KB have been transferred. Copying a 29 MB file from the external drive to the local drive takes about 10 seconds.

Then if I unmount it, change the line in /etc/fstab to

/dev/sdc1       /mnt/sdc1     auto    noauto,user,exec     0       0

then copying the 29 MB file to the external disk takes an unnoticeable fraction of a second. Same with copying to the local disk from the external disk.

See this article and the reference to "usbtree". It tells how to check if the usb is functioning as 1.1 or 2.0 :

Linux and USB 2.0.

Solution 2:

So I came to this page through a google search of the same issue ("ubuntu 15 speed up usb transfer") because my transfers were running at 75kb/s.

This was probably only the solution for my setup but my 16GB USB 3 drive was formatted to GPT fat32, I deleted all partitions, initialized to MBR, made a single NTFS partition, plugged it back into my Ubuntu PC and it's now transferring a 10GB file at over 50MB/s. For me, problem solved.