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I have a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B that is connected with an Ethernet cable to my router. When I try to copy files to my laptop (which is connected using WiFi) using FileZilla or Samba (in either direction) the throughput achieved isn't more than 1 MB/sec.

The USB external hard drive connected to the PI is in ext4 format.

Additional information:

hdparm displays for the SD and the HDD:

/dev/mmcblk0p2: 
Timing cached reads: 412 MB in 2.00 seconds = 205.64 MB/sec 
Timing buffered disk reads: 54 MB in 3.07 seconds = 17.59 MB/sec 

/dev/sda1: 
Timing cached reads: 396 MB in 2.00 seconds = 197.59 MB/sec 
Timing buffered disk reads: 62 MB in 3.09 seconds = 20.07 MB/sec

What do I need to do to achieve higher throughput.

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  • Your question is unclear. You mention "copy files to my laptop" then "external hard drive is already in ext4 format". If you are trying to copy to a laptop the 2nd seems irrelevant.
    – Milliways
    Sep 3, 2015 at 0:32
  • @Milliways Having the drive in NTFS does provide somewhat of an overhead and subsequently a slowdown. So in that regard it its relevant.
    – Havnar
    Sep 3, 2015 at 7:47
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    When on the RPi you try to copy a file from the SD card to the external HDD, is it reasonably fast? How is your laptop connected to the router? WiFi? Try with a cable first! Finally 1mb/s is a unit I don't know. Is it 1MB/s (megabytes) or 1 Mb/s (megabits)?
    – Huygens
    Sep 3, 2015 at 8:38
  • Sorry, the rasPi is connected to my router using an Ethernet Cable, and my laptop is connected using the Wifi. I'm not using NTFS in the Hard Drive on the RasPi The speed is in MB/s! Also, using hdparm in the SD and the HDD: /dev/mmcblk0p2: Timing cached reads: 412 MB in 2.00 seconds = 205.64 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 54 MB in 3.07 seconds = 17.59 MB/sec /dev/sda1: Timing cached reads: 396 MB in 2.00 seconds = 197.59 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 62 MB in 3.09 seconds = 20.07 MB/sec
    – Myrium
    Sep 4, 2015 at 2:37
  • Thanks for all the editing! I did some testes, using another External Drive, formated with NTFS, the speed was only 1MB/s, but now i can transfer at 2 MB/s with the old drive. Also, using my windows partition on my laptop, i can transfer at 4.8 MB/s. It could be actually an OSX thing?
    – Myrium
    Sep 8, 2015 at 19:02

1 Answer 1

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Possible problems/solutions:

  • Your Power supply is too light, upgrade to a 5V/2A PSU with a short, high quality USB cable. (longer/low quality cables make you lose power quite quickly).
  • Never expect stellar transfer speeds from the Pi, you can however overclock the Pi safely up to 1ghz and see some performance gains.
  • Try using NFS instead of smb/ftp.
  • Make sure you are using a local IP and not a public one, just to be sure it isn't routing over the internet instead of your LAN.
  • ADDITION: Lastly, USB and Ethernet share the same bus on the Pi. So again, don't expect huge transfer speeds.
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  • -I'm using a power supply already made for the Pi. -I will give a check for the overclock and NFS, i will post the results! -Yeah, i'm using a local IP too.
    – Myrium
    Sep 4, 2015 at 2:43

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