Hi Ralf,
I am copying from an internal SATA SSD via USB 3 to an external SATA WD Blue, a 3.5" CMR HDD.
The first part “cp -ai /mnt/winos7/” (see [*1]) took about 70 minutes for 188 GiB, almost all files are quite small. The second part “cp -ai /mnt/winos10/” (see [*1]) should copy about 100 GiB small files + about 740 GiB for a single vbox vdi file. The about 100 GiB small files were copied and about 310 GiB of the vdi file were also already copied, at 03:30, so for about 410 GiB it took about 9 hours. I think this is taking far too long.
Does anyone have an idea?
No, though I tend to use rsync(1) on large copies which might need continuing, or checking that the copy is identical after an unmount/mount to ensure the media is being read. Have you checked what SMART data can be accessed on the drives, given the possible restrictions like USB?
%Cpu(s): 1.8 us, 0.8 sy, 0.0 ni, 84.3 id, 12.9 wa, 0.1 hi, 0.1 si, 0.0 st
12.9% wait is waiting for I/O. I'm guessing you have eight cores as 1/8 = 0.125 CPU. IOW, the cp(1) is I/O bound. You may find ‘vmstat 1’ interesting to monitor the number of blocks I/O'd, ‘bi’ and ‘bo’. And dstat -cd -Dtotal,sda1,sda2 handy to monitor the about of waiting, ‘wai’, and the data moved between block devices. -- Cheers, Ralph.