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?

  • @sun_is_raEnglish
    10•2 months ago

    My guess is that laptop 1 is connected to the HD through USB2 not USB3. Or u r using USB hub

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•2 months ago

      I’m not using a USB hub. How can I confirm that the usb port is indeed a 3.0 one? Is the color blue of the port enough?

      • @[email protected]English
        6•2 months ago

        It’s hard to be completely sure with USB. I think if you can identify the controller, you should be reasonably sure it’s actually USB 3 (but then you’ve got the various flavours of USB 3).

        You can browse the output of lspci which should tell you the capabilities of your controllers. In theory.

        • @[email protected]
          1•2 months ago

          Am easy option is to check the output of lsusb and check which bus the storage device shows up on. Device 1 on each bus is the controller which will show as usb1/2/3, with every other device on that bus running at that speed.