Do you think you may be using USB sticks with a small SLC cache? If this is the case I would expect the transfer to be fast until the cache fills up then it would slow down to the speed of the rest of the NAND for remainder of the transfer. You wouldn't experience the slow down unless you were transferring files larger than the cache. This could explain why the issue has followed you across so many computers.

More affordable USB sticks may have cache sizes of 1 - 2 GB. I've seen high performance models available with 64GB caches.

If this is the cause of your issue, using a USB stick with a faster cache would be a solution.

This has been my goto fix on a number of problematic machines:

Add these lines to the end of /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf

vm.dirty_bytes=50331648

vm.dirty_background_bytes=16777216

in your shoes, i would switch to a terminal to get hard numbers instead of gut feelings and try different file systems and copy utilities.

Right now I'm not at home so I can't check, I drag and drop the files with the default file browser on cinnamon.

This time I formatted the stick in ext4 but it was the same with NTFS.

what are you using to copy? what filesystem is the usb stick using?

Right now I have 8 but it was the same when I had 16.

I know exFAT is much more efficient than FAT32. Also, how much ram do you have? If less than 8g that could also be related.

That's the most frustrating part, most people can't reproduce the issue while it has been following me across three laptops, two desktops and all the usb sticks I've ever owned on NTFS, ext4 or FAT32.

I guess I'll try exFAT

I'm using LMDE 7 and I cannot reproduce this.

My setup is a no name USB 3.0 32g usb stick formatted exFAT. I tested using cp to copy a 170k file to the usb stick and it took less than half a second. I ran it with time to make sure. When I ejected the drive it took maybe 1 second more before it was ready to remove.

ETA: I just tested a 1G file and it took 45 seconds to copy and run sync.

I have sudo apt install spd in my notes for better audio compatibility but I can't remember why. Nonetheless, I wonder if this may bell.

in your shoes, i would switch to using the /etc/fstab configuration file instead of xfce's or kde's file manager to handle it for you.

because the only alternative i can think of is to ensure that you're using the same module/driver version/configuration between cinnamon and mint and that's significantly more difficult than adding 2 or 3 short lines to /etc/fstab.

@Kory@lemmy.ml Other than Firefox and the default FTP tool, I don't remove anything from Mint, not even Thunar which I don't like. Dolphin I mention more because, for the issue, I use it as a visual troubleshooting tool.

Edit: Thunar being the default file browser from Mint, in case someone passing by doesn't know.

Quick question: why are you talking about KDE's Dolphin? Did you install that instead the default software? If yes, did you check if "Disks" (that comes with Cinnamon) is showing your devices?

Ooooooooh

I use mainly Mint nowadays and Raspberrian as I need, so wasn't aware. =O

iirc, this is standard behavior across Debian-based distros. apt-get may handle it slightly differently, but I'm sure there's a switch for it, at worst.