Is there a way to fix the slow writing speeds on USB sticks? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 month ago by quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/linuxmint@lemmy.ml

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I've had this issue since the first day I started using linux about 15 years ago. Always the same issue, transfers start fine and slows down to a crawl, only on USB sticks.

The USB sticks are fine, I can make bootable sticks in five minutes but if I copy a file of similar size to them is half an hour and then five to ten more minutes waiting to be able to safely remove the drive.

There are dozens of forum posts, some blaming the drives, others the GUI, dirty buffers, outdated kernels, fastboot for some reason. Others marked as solved without a solution because it magically solved itself.

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[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

there's a thing that drives me nuts with linux, i really wish it showed actual progress. are you aware of a way?

i once sat for like 30 minutes waiting for the actual write to finish after unmounting. makes me want to disable caching altogether.

[-] D_Air1@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The command I used before changing the defaults was this sync && watch -d grep -e Dirty: -e Writeback: /proc/meminfo

That should show you the progress. It should be going down as it is being written to disk.

this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026

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