Is it expected to take a week to backup 3TB to USB?

[hendry]

I want to backup my ~3TB of precious memories to an external USB drive. The idea is that that I post it to my parents place for safe keeping.

I bought https://www.amazon.sg/gp/product/B07VNTFHD5/ which claims speeds "upto" 130MB/s

Plugged it in the back of my HP Microserver Gen 8, into a "Superspeed" blue coloured USB port.


At first I rsynced the data across and I could see it would never go higher than say 4.74MB/s. Ok, I thought. Rsync must be terribly slow. I will copy first and then rsync later to ensure I have a good copy.

red/redsamba on /mnt/red/redsamba (zfs, local, noatime, nfsv4acls)
/dev/da1p1 on /mnt/black (ext2fs, local)

So I'm doing a `sudo cp -a /mnt/red/redsamba/ /mnt/black/`

This operation has been going for about 2 days and only 1TB has been copied. I'm checking via `sudo du -sh /mnt/black/` which takes about 10 minutes right now. I am absolutely terrorfied that I would need to restart this operation.

This begs the question... holy moly... WHY IS THIS SO SLOW? If something like this happened at work, we couldn't afford to wait around for a week for ~3TB data to be moved into place.

Am I missing something?!

 

[winnielinnie]

I wonder if this is related to ext2,3,4 file system on a FreeBSD-based operating system?

When I do a zfs send/recv to an external drive plugged in via a USB3 port, it reaches near the advertised speeds. However, the external drives I've used plug into their own dedicated power (with a 3.5" drive inside the enclosure), unlike the portable 2.5" external drives like the one you linked.

 

[hendry]

Is this a fair way to test my SMB performance between my T14s Archlinux and TrueNAS-12.0-U1.1 HP Microserver Gen 8?

 

[Arwen]

Most high capacity, 2.5" hard drives are SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR drives are much slower for writes than CMR / PMR, (Conventional or Perpendicular Magnetic Recording). I poked around Western Digital's web site and could not confirm it's using SMR. However, WD has in the past hidden SMR usage from it's documentation. So, I would assume it's SMR unless proven otherwise.

So, the answer is yes, it can take a while.

SMR drives can work for backups. I own a Seagate 8TB SMR 3.5" drive and use it exclusively for my backups. (It was the only cost effective 8TB drive at the time I bought it.) My backup method uses a ZFS scrub first, and then uses Rsync to update with any changes. It's slow, (perhaps taking overnight), but doable for me as I am not backup window constrained.

If you can, you might checkout using several smaller 2.5" drives that use CMR

 

[pschatz100]

Do I understand that you are trying to write data to an external drive that was formatted ext2? I don't believe writing ext2 is supported by TrueNAS. Perhaps this is causing your performance issue. I seem to recall a few posts, some years ago, where users were complaining about this.

Why don't you format the disk for ZFS and see if that works better? I backup data, using rsync, via USB to an external drive on a weekly basis without issue - but my disks are all formatted for ZFS.