[lug] Big External USB copies and Speed

[George Sexton]

My experience has been that creating one large file is MUCH faster than
creating many small files.

 

IOW, use tar to backup a directory rather than copying the directory.

 

Actually, I found tar over SSH to a second computer to be faster than tar to
a USB drive. YMMV.

 

George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
 <http://www.mhsoftware.com/> http://www.mhsoftware.com/
Voice: 303 438 9585
  

From: lug-bounces at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-bounces at lug.boulder.co.us]
On Behalf Of Gordon Golding
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 2:21 PM
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: [lug] Big External USB copies and Speed

 

I'm doing some 1 Terabyte backups to external USB drives.

In the past I've heard comments that:
 the limiting factor is really the USB speed
some brand drives are way faster than others
the most important thing is:  are you copying big contiguous files or
massive numbers of little tiny files

Thoughts?
Anybody have an estimate on how long a 1 TB copy would take?

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