I had the same problem, needed to backup 200+ GB to a USB HD due to a hardware upgrade. Then I remembered the board had a strange bios reset recently (hence the upgrade) so I checked and set the bios SATA configuration back from IDE to AHCI (My mobo has 3 possible settings IDE, RAID and AHCI). Now it's supper silent (no more swapping to disk) and a steady transfer rate (+/- 27 MB/sec).
This is the solution that helped me, and hopefully some others. -- file transfers on USB disk are very slow https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/197762 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs