Hi,

I have an Oracle Linux Server and I have been backing up my server on an external usb 2 drive with a fat32 file system for ages without any problems. In order to backup about 20GB it took about 45 minutes. But I reached a point where I had some large files > 4GB which could not be backed up on a fat32 system.

So I decided to re-format the external drive to an ext4 partition. The results were devastating. It took about 15 hours to complete the backup.

I tried the same with an ext3 format, but the results were the same.

Am I doing something wrong?

I'm not sure why you're seeing such a drop in performance but try disabling journaling on ext4. I've experienced some fairly substantial speed ups in usb drives from that.

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Yes, but the difference in performance is very big, i.e. 45 minutes vs 15 hours.

I do not think disabling journalling will do the trick. By the way, I just reformatted the external drive to NTFS and a backup of 20GB was done in just 15 minutes.

I am forced to use NTFS as I have not other choice. Am I the only one having such slow performance on ext3/ ext4?

By the way, the actual file system on the server is ext3.

usb2 is only 35 MB/s . So 20GB will take a bit of time

it takes me about 5 to 8 min. to move a 14 gig image ( yes ONE 14 gig photo ) to my 3Tb storage drive , formatted to ext4 -- with journalling

the time difference is what is also running at the time

How is the drive mounted ?
I use a udev rule to force it to /dev/sdc and mount it in fstab

don't forget about the "bit VS. byte " sizes "Mb VS. MB"

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Hi John,

I do not create a specific entry in fstab, the drive simply gets mounted automatically when I plug it in. But you say that you copy 14GB in about 8 minutes. I need 10-15 hours to store 20GB. Do you think that the way it was mounted makes a difference?

If yes, can you please send me your example fstab mount command?

Thank you.

seeing as that is based off ?? what RHEL 5 or RHEL6

As in what version is it

I take it there is a DE used ( guessing Gnome2 )

is the system using fuse ( 5 had an issue with fuse and the kernel, fixed in 5.3 ) and is gnome what is mounting it
or an init script

Right now i am only just guessing , so.....



my fstab entry is just a very basic one
allowing the "users" group full read / write

and rhel 5 or 6 are not using "udev" so that is not an issue

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I am using RHEL5 with KDE 3.5.4

Fuse was not even installed. I installed it a few days ago just to be able to use NTFS file systems. Currently I am backing up on an NTFS external drive. It takes only about 45 minutes to back up 33GB.

But I really would like to find out what am I doing wrong and ext3/4 takes so long.

By the way, the server is using ext3 for its main OS partition and I have not experienced any problems with that.

Thank you.

Is this an "Advanced Format" drive with 4KB physical sectors? If so, a partition that is not aligned on a 4KB boundary (multiple of 8 512-byte logical sectors) can reduce write performance by a factor of 10. Example:

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rknichols has a very good point

how was the drive formatted

the 3 Tb i am using is ( 4k as above )

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Unfortunately hdparm does not work with this drive, it gives the following error:

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument

reformat the drive

i use Gparted live cd
unless you must use special settings
leave it at the default settings and format to ext4
for a back up drive one partition is fine
if you need partitions, then 3 normal primary
one extended
then as many logical as needed

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