High CPU usage when copying files to USB mass storage device

Misha Shnurapet shnurapet at fedoraproject.org
Wed Jul 6 07:02:28 UTC 2011


06.07.2011, 01:14, "Patrick O'Callaghan" <pocallaghan at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 17:01 +0800, 某因幡 wrote:
>
>>  Hi,
>>  I've tried to copy some different files to an USB flash disk and an USB HDD
>>  and tried different USB hubs.
>>  After a while the system gets very slow, switching between windows can take
>>  quite a while. The copying speed is slow, too(only several MB/s to an empty
>>  USB HDD).
>>  The machine is not old, just bought it this year. And on the same machine
>>  the same problem is not seen on Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7.
>>  Any ideas?
>
> Flash and HDD are two different cases. Flash drives can become slow
> because of their internal architecture, fragmentation, wear leveling
> etc. (lots of info on this via Google). I use an 8GB pen drive a lot and
> every so often find it useful to reformat it completely, which seems to
> help. This is a VFAT drive since it has to be compatible with another
> (non-Linux) system.
>
> In the HDD case, you may just have a slow USB port. Check if it's USB-1,
> USB-2 or USB-3 (unlikely at the moment). And remember that USB doesn't
> do DMA, so writing large amounts of data means soaking up CPU time.

I think it only must be slow, the copying process. But, I have an 8GB SD HC card in my phone which connects via a miniUSB cable, and when I copy mp3 files it hangs the whole system. The mouse cursor stops responding.

I think a bug report should be created. Not sure about the component, though.

-- 
Best regards,
Misha Shnurapet, Fedora Project Contributor
Email: shnurapet AT fedoraproject.org, IRC: misha on freenode
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/shnurapet, GPG: 00217306


More information about the users mailing list