I have two laptops, I’ll call them laptop 1 and laptop 2.

Laptop 1 is my gaming laptop, and laptop 2 is a very low-spec one that I use as a jellyfin server. Here’s the neofetch result for both of them:

Laptop 1

Laptop 2

The problem

On both of them, I copied a 5GB folder from the laptop to my 3.0 usb flash drive, I used this rsync command on each:

rsync -a --progress folder_path destination_folder_path

Laptop Average transfer speed
Laptop 1 9MB/s
Laptop 2 45MB/s

How is this possible? The Laptop 1 is way superior than laptop 2. The laptop 1 has an nvme SSD while laptop 2 has an old 320GB HDD, yet the transfer speed difference is insane.

Does KDE affect the folder copying somehow? If I copy a file on the same SSD on laptop 1, the speed reaches more than 400MB/s.

What is going on here?

  • @some_guy
    1•3 months ago

    You could try copying the same data under different circumstances.

    How about to another location on the same disk? How about to a location over the network via wifi? If possible, the same test over a wired connection? If you have a flash reader and a card, try that too?

    These will help rule in or out USB as a contributing factor.

    Edit: further, you could boot to a live image to isolate whether it’s a software issue or a configuration issue vs hardware.