is there a way how to check USB speed for connected devices (hdd) ? I can get only 30MBps from my connected HDD via USB 3.x
or maybe check if the devices using USB 2.x or 3.x ?
Which filesystem do you use? NTFS for instance is notoriously slow on Linux.
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Hi @jork,
to check whether the device is connected as USB 2 or 3 you need to connect to your router over SSH and issue command: lsusb -t
Following lines are showing output from my MOX. The 5000M indicates, that the bandwidth of USB 3 will be fully utilised.
root@MOX-A:~# lsusb -t
/: Bus 05.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci-hcd/1p, 5000M
/: Bus 04.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci-hcd/1p, 480M
/: Bus 03.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 5000M
|__ Port 1: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=usb-storage, 5000M
/: Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/1p, 480M
|__ Port 1: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Hub, Driver=hub/4p, 480M
/: Bus 01.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=orion-ehci/1p, 480M
Following commands will tell you how much time is needed to write and read 1 GB of data to your USB device.
Write 1 GB of data, adjust /mnt/speedtest/tempfile.tmp according to your mount point
root@MOX-A:~# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/speedtest/tempfile.tmp bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
real 0m 11.98s
user 0m 0.01s
sys 0m 3.88s
Read 1 GB of data, adjust /mnt/speedtest/tempfile.tmp according to your mount point:
root@MOX-A:~# time dd if=/mnt/speedtest/tempfile.tmp of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
real 0m 13.25s
user 0m 0.00s
sys 0m 2.91s
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Thank you both @bdeblier , @dkomrska .
I’ve checked my HDD is using USB 3, but speed is slow because of NTFS 
unfortunately I need file system which I can use also with windows 
What about exfat? …
will be the performance on linux better with exFat than NTFS? and what about sudden shut down of electricity?
exFAT has better performance as it uses a kernel driver (while NTFS uses a FUSE driver). But it is more error-prone than NTFS because it doesn’t use journaling and therefore the saved data can become inconsistent if a write operation is interrupted.
well, then you better use BTRFS and winbtrfs for Windows10
I use exFAT and it works for me just fine. Although I don’t require fail-safe features.