Why is ntfs so slow

The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 8 years, 4 months ago. Active 9 months ago. Viewed 44k times. Improve this question. Have you tried testing dd with raw drive access on the drive or partition, doesn't matter?

Note that testing that way will destroy the filesystem and will lose any data on it. It will bypass the NTFS drivers entirely. Just out of curiosity I have to ask if this drive is one of those 4k drives and if therefore your filesystem might be unaligned somehow?! The company behind the driver suggests buying the commercial version for better performance.

Apparently no-one cares enough to actually fix and if necessary, fork the open source version because this problem has been around for almost a decade, ever since NTFS-3G was first released. With the same Ubuntu Copying 2GB of pictures to the first one was taking forever 6 hours left estimated after 30 minutes , but to the second one USB stick it only took a minute or two.

Tip: Linux is very handy for handling multiple file system formats. Keep a copy of live Ubuntu or some such on another USB drive. Really, the whole deal comes down to how you use your USB drive. I format to NTFS. Is there a solution to fix it? Why is it happening?

I'm really curious about that! Thanks for your attention :. Improve this question. Jack Jack 1 1 gold badge 2 2 silver badges 9 9 bronze badges. Do you have the ntfs-3g package? Because you can mount it, I'm expecting you do, but there might be a special case where it was mounted a different way.

Can you check how it was mounted? Jack Glad I could help out, but you solved the problem on your own! Be sure to answer your own question below and mark it as the correct answer so that others with the same issue can easily find the answer.

Show 3 more comments. Learn more. Asked 8 years, 11 months ago. Active 8 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 4k times. Improve this question.

Dmytro Sirenko 4, 17 17 silver badges 25 25 bronze badges. Arno Arno 7, 7 7 gold badges 35 35 silver badges 50 50 bronze badges.