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How to speed up rsync between two local disks?

Fresh3 days ago
Mar 15, 2026235372 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

I'm running rsync to sync a directory onto my external USB HDD. It's about 150 gigs of data. 50000+ files I would guess. It's running it's first sync at the moment, but its copying files at a rate of only 1-5 MB/s. That seems incredibly slow for a USB 2.0 enclosure. There are no other transfers happening on the drive either. Here are the options I used: I'm running Ubuntu Server 9.10.

Error Output

rsync -avz --progress /mysourcefolder /mytargetfolder

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Fix for: How to speed up rsync between two local disks?

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If you're using rsync with a fast network or disk to disk in the same machine, not using compression -z and using --inplace speeds it up to the performance of the harddrives or network compression uses lots of CPU not using inplace makes the harddrive thrash alot (it uses a temp file before creating the final) compression & not using inplace is better for doing it over the internet (slow network) NEW: Be aware of the destination... if there is NTFS "compression" enabled... this severely slows d…

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