Comment 34 for bug 177235

Same problem here (Ubuntu 9.10 x64).

I'm not a hardware expert, but I'll say my experience:

I see that it's like it starts to transfer really fast, and then it slows down and down and down, I guess it has something to do with the sync, as if I sync after transferring each file the overall result is MUCH faster than transferring all at once.

Let's say I have to move 10 files of about 300 megs each. If i go to nautilus and move them by selecting them all to the external HD file 1 transfers at 20mb/s and when it reaches file 3 the speed is 4mb/s. If I cancel and unmount then it takes a lot of time (aprox 10 mins or more) to unmount it.

On the other hand I created an script that simply does moves the files syncing after each transfer:

while f=`ls | head -n1`
do
        echo "Moving $f"
        mv -v "$f" /media/NicoMB/Videos/
        echo "Syncing"
        sync
done

And this is waaaay faster! And unmount takes no time.

Please let me know if you need anything in order to help sort this out