Hello everybody,
I have this very weird problem, that I have noticed some 2 or 3 days ago, and of a kind I have never heard before. I made a post in fedora.forum (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=259047), but get no awswer since then, and now I have been advised to post here too.
Briefly, the problem is that the
copy speed between the partition in which I am running my Fedora and
another partition where I store backup data is now 50K/s, which is extremely
slow by any standart (it has been usually around 10M/s, almost 200 times faster). This is for exemple much lower than the copy speed between my computers in my lab and home, via internet, which is obviously absurd. I have been using Fedora 64 for many years, and this is the first time I have a problem that I cannot solve by myself, which is very frustrating. Let me proceed with the details.
My laptop is a HP Pavillion Dv7 2080 ep, in which I have two disks of
250G each. One of the disks is partitioned between two operational systems,
Fedora 14 64 and Windows 7 64, and the other disk contains the above
referred partition where I store my backups (I call it backup disk).
The problem happens when I try to copy anything from my home in
Fedora to the backup disk, and also when, while using fedora, I try to move data within the backup disk itself. I first thought it could be a hardware problem in the
backup disk. Then I login into the windows and made a copy of some AVI
files (3G approx) to the backup disk, which went normally, within a few
seconds, thus eliminating this possibility. I move data within the backup iself disk using windows also without any problem. I try therefore to make the
inverse process, a copy from the backup disk into my home folder in
Fedora. It went normally, copying 4 G also within few seconds, actually
with an excellent speed of 50M/s.
After searching in google, I saw some
people also complaining of slow copy speed (although they had 7M/s, more
than 100 times faster than what I have now), and one cause could be
that the source file system (in my case the Fedora home folder) would be
near its full capacity. I therefore eliminate everything that I could,
around 15G, and now I have like 20G of free disk space, which I think is
more than enough for everything. The problem, however, persists. Some
people also said that it could be the type of files and/or amount of
data. I therefore tried several kinds of files (from raw data files to
AVI and RMVB regular video files), and several amounts of data (from
single files with a few Megas to folders with 20G) and in all cases I
had the same unacceptably low copy speed of 50K/s. Another possibility was checking the disk via the command line "hdparm", but since I am not an expert I could not identify anything wrong from its output. Anyway, here it is for both disks (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb):