Linux NTFS performance

[flip-mode]

I'm copying 363 GiB from one disk to another. The average transfer speed is 8.7 MB / sec. That seems horrendously low. This is on an AMD 690G motherboard. Is something wack?

[Kurotetsu]

Going from previous Tech Report reviews, the SB600 southbridge has some serious AHCI performance issues. This extends to the SB700 and SB750 models as well. So if you're running in AHCI mode, that could be the problem.

Though, also going by TR's reviews, you can solve this by not using AMD's drivers. For example, in the TR review they used the default Vista drivers. They got the performance back in exchange for higher CPU utilization. Does Linux have some form of default AHCI driver you can switch to?

[just brew it!]

The issue may not be the chipset, it may be (as the thread title suggests) NTFS performance on Linux. The ability to write to NTFS partitions in Linux is a fairly recent development; it is possible that it is just not very well optimized yet. What distro are you using, and are you using the stock NTFS support for said distro?

Edit: If I am interpreting this table correctly, Linux NTFS performance should be comparable to the native ext3 file system for sequential operations, but will be much slower if you are creating large numbers of tiny files. That's assuming, of course, that you're using a reasonably current version of the NTFS-3G driver whose performance is similar to the one used to create the benchmark table.

Edit #2: And any file system will slow down quite a bit if you are creating lots of small files, as opposed to fewer large files. What sort of data is this? If you are copying thousands of little files, your throughput is probably not out of line. If you are moving mostly large files, then yeah that is way slow.

[flip-mode]

Thanks JBI. It's a total of 21,000+ files using Ubuntu 9.04.

[nightmorph]

Flip, remember that when using NTFS-3G, there will be a performance hit, because you're going through FUSE. Stuff that runs through FUSE is never running at full potential; that includes other filesystems like Sun's ZFS.

However, the Linux-NTFS project recently released a version of ntfsprogs that has full native read/write support, so you may want to see about using these utilities (along with native support in-kernel) rather than NTFS-3G and FUSE. If it's possible, that is.

[bthylafh]

A couple days ago I copied a few gigs from an ext3 partition to NTFS (same disk) via the FUSE driver, and I think the speed was around 15 to 16 megabits per second. Intel 965 chipset, ICH8 southbridge, 64-bit Ubuntu.