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I'm pretty new to Linux and I've been running into issues while copying files from my internal SSD drive to an external USB flash stick. When I start copying large files (~1Gb), almost instantaneously, the progress bar goes near to the end (>90%) and stops there for nearly 5 minutes.

I was checking some posts talking about the write cachen and how to disable it, so this leaded me to try different methods:

echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs
echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
hdparm -W 0 /dev/sdb1
echo 2000000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes
echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio

But none of those worked for me. I also read some suggestion of formating properly the flash drive, so I formated the drive using gparted to fat32, but the behaviour remains the same.

I'm also concerned about how this tweaks could effect to my SSD drive behaviour and life.

What I understood is that the progress bar shows the process of the kernel transfering the file from the drive to the intermedium buffer. Is there any way to avoid this behaviour for external drives? Ddoes this have any effect on internal drives?

Thanks

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    Are you experiencing freezing or any other problems other than the progress bar staying in one place for a long time?
    – LawrenceC
    Feb 28, 2019 at 23:09
  • What's this progress bar from anyway? Tried dd, it can show a progress / io stats with either a status=progress or receiving a USR1 signal, and also has flags like oflag=direct or oflag=nocache that might help with your testing. Or a disk read/write monitor, most system monitors (conky) can show how fast writes are occuring.
    – Xen2050
    Mar 1, 2019 at 3:09
  • @LawrenceC It's somehow freezeing. After some minutes, the file is actually copied, the progress bar dissapears and the file manager is responsive again. If I try to cancel the copy process, the file manager freezes and I think that it actually copy the file anyway, but does not un-freeze until the process is finished, while it should stop immadiately. It's in the tags, but anyway, as a reference, I'm using Linux Mint Mate.
    – Carles
    Mar 1, 2019 at 16:34

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