copying files (speed)

[Rick]

On Sun, 17 May 2009 16:07:29 -0400
Rashkae <ubuntu at tigershaunt.com> wrote:

> What I'm trying to determine is if you are running into an index
> issue. You said you have 3gb of small files.  If the files are really
> small, it's common for a process that tries to read them all do do so
> very very slowly on filesystems that use a b-tree index, such as
> Reiserfs, or ext3 if you add the dir_index option.  (I haven't gotten
> around to testing this on EXT4 yet.)  On the other hand, you haven't
> told us what your external drive is. Is it a Flash Memory (ie, usb
> stick), or a hard drive?   Write speed of only a few MB/s would be
> typical for a USB flash memory type USB stick.. (though you say you
> get over 20MB/s from windows, in this case, I would have to be
> skeptical)
> 
> In any case, I've never tried writing a large number of files to an
> NTFS drive (or for that matter, writing any files to NTFS at all),
> but it wouldn't surprise me if there was some kind of performance
> issue doing so... NTFS is not an easy filesystem for open source to
> reverse engineer well (Judging simply by how many years it took
> before we even had beta quality write ability to the filesystem)


Hi, My External Hard Drive is a 500GB USB 2 formated with NTFS
my Internal Hard Drive, is a 500GB Seagate, formated with ext3

Should I reformat the external hard drive, with a different format,
NTFS...????


What would you recommend for a removable usb external hard drive ?


Thanks!
Rick