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?
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
lspciwhich should tell you the capabilities of your controllers. In theory.Am easy option is to check the output of
lsusband 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.