4TB

[LennartL]

Bought a 4TB hd which is divided into 2. So 2 plus 2TB.
Have had to reshape them to FAT32 both 2.
But the question is: Why does it take so Loooong time to copy over my files to one of them.
Takes forever.
Anyone have tips or advice?
Run LinuxMint 20.2 Mate

[t42]

If you have a SATA3 drive and old drive has sufficient read speed then
1 TB of data will be copied in 2 hours (write speed about 140 MB/sec)
If old drive reading speed is 50 MB/sec then 1 TB will be copied in 5 and a half hours
Note that above estimation is for big files. Coping small files is noticeably longer.

[LennartL]

This is what my computer looks like:

Lennarts dator.odt

(11.71 KiB) Downloaded 38 times

It is from my 500GB disk that I will copy over to one of the 2TB disks

[GELvdH]

As t42 said with his explanations, when you trf several Gig it takes a long time.

[AndyMH]

Bought a 4TB hd which is divided into 2. So 2 plus 2TB.
Have had to reshape them to FAT32 both 2.

Post the output from sudo parted --list. fat32 is not a good choice - maximum file size is 4GB, you would be better off with ntfs if you want windows compatibility.

[mediclaser]

Bought a 4TB hd which is divided into 2. So 2 plus 2TB.
Have had to reshape them to FAT32 both 2.
But the question is: Why does it take so Loooong time to copy over my files to one of them.
Takes forever.
Anyone have tips or advice?
Run LinuxMint 20.2 Mate

I presume this is because the R/W heads have to keep switching back and forth between two partitions of the same physical drive. This is unlike copying between two physical drives of 2 TB size each which would work way faster.

[Grayfox]

That post of your computer specs doesn't really tell me much.

Are you connecting to a SATA2 port or SATA3 port
Some motherboards have both types of ports

What mode is the SATA controller set to
If the controller is set to IDE mode you may have a performance hit

What are the sector sizes of the file system
Smaller sector sizes increases access times, but you get less wasted space, and larger sector sizes reduces access times but you will get more wasted space.
The type of File System used, some file systems are more efficient when it comes to performance.

Source Location.
If you going from one part of the same drive to another, you will lose a good chunk of performance as the read write head has to go from X location on the drive to Y location on the drive then it has to write metadata to the filetable

File sizes will play a HUGE HUGE PART.
If you are writing small files like mp3s, jpg, etc, the read write head has to go from the area its writing to, to the file table location to write the metadata, then it has to go back to writing files.

This is why when coping photos you may get 5MB/s of throughput but when copying a movie across you get the higher speeds.

I would not use FAT32 these days, unless its for something that has to use it for compatibility(like a TV which can only read from FAT32 based filesystems)
Linux has good NTFS support where you can create an NTFS filesystem, write data to an NTFS file system and read from it.

FAT32 also is not a journaled filesystem which can lead to dataloss if something was to go wrong.

[valouch]

Disk type not specified so guess only: SMR disk?