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I've set up a SAMBA share on a Linux Mint 18 box that I'm using as a file server, and I'm attempting to copy files from the share to a Windows 10 machine. Both machines are connected to ethernet. In the Windows 10 copy dialog box, I'm seeing speeds varying between 700KB/s and 2.3MB/s, and a time remaining estimate of 4+ hours to copy ~20GB of files.

The files that I'm sharing from the Linux Mint 18 box reside on an external hard drive that is connected via USB and mounted with fstab. Here's my fstab (it's the Seagate Backup Plus Drive):

~$ cat /etc/fstab
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=c1b47d55-b3a8-422d-a10b-2ecc6d5e5c83 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=464a16f6-0ed3-4f66-883c-d28e27479c3a none            swap    sw              0       0

# Seagate Backup Plus Drive
UUID=1E1280D31280B0F7   /mnt/media  ntfs-3g auto,users,permissions  0   0

Since the drive is external, I expect it to be slower than an internal SSD, but a speed test shows that it's not the bottleneck:

~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=tempfile bs=102400 count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB, 100 MiB) copied, 0.703176 s, 149 MB/s

149MB/s is a lot faster than 2MB/s. I'd be more than happy with that sort of transfer speed.

The network card in my Linux Mint 18 box is a Qualcomm Atheros AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10), and I have the alx driver installed:

~$ modinfo alx
filename:       /lib/modules/4.13.0-32-generic/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/alx/alx.ko
license:        GPL
description:    Qualcomm Atheros(R) AR816x/AR817x PCI-E Ethernet Network Driver
author:         Qualcomm Corporation, <[email protected]>
author:         Johannes Berg <[email protected]>
srcversion:     15DC599B88652387E1F807D
alias:          pci:v00001969d000010A0sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
alias:          pci:v00001969d000010A1sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
alias:          pci:v00001969d00001090sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
alias:          pci:v00001969d0000E0B1sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
alias:          pci:v00001969d0000E0A1sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
alias:          pci:v00001969d0000E091sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
alias:          pci:v00001969d00001091sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
depends:        mdio
intree:         Y
name:           alx
vermagic:       4.13.0-32-generic SMP mod_unload

Here's the info on my ethernet connection:

~$ sudo ethtool enp2s0
Settings for enp2s0:
Supported ports: [ TP ]
Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                        100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
                        1000baseT/Full 
Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                        100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
                        1000baseT/Full 
Advertised pause frame use: Symmetric
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 1000Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 0
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
MDI-X: Unknown
Current message level: 0x000060e4 (24804)
               link ifup rx_err tx_err hw wol
Link detected: yes

This is what my smb.conf looks like:

~$ testparm
# Global parameters
[global]
server string = %h server (Samba, Ubuntu)
security = USER
map to guest = Bad User
syslog = 0
log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
name resolve order = bcast host
dns proxy = No
panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d
idmap config * : backend = tdb

[MyShare]
path = "/mnt/media/My Share"
force user = nobody
read only = No
guest ok = Yes

I'd like to use the Linux Mint 18 box as a backup spot for video files that I'm editing, and I need faster transfer speeds in order for this to be practical.

If there's any more information that I can provide that would be helpful, please let me know.

Update: Some folks on the internet were suggesting trying the transfer with a different protocol. I used an SFTP client on the Windows machine to transfer a large file from the Linux Mint 18 machine, and saw a transfer speed slightly higher than SAMBA, but still peaking at 2.1MiB/s. This leads me to believe that SAMBA may not be at fault.

I tried moving a large file off of my external drive (the Seagate Backup Plus Drive that I had shared via SAMBA), onto the internal drive that Linux Mint 18 is installed on. I then repeated the SFTP test, and saw transfer speeds peaking at 2.9MiB/s. This suggests to me that the problem may not be SAMBA or the external drive, but something in my networking setup.

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Well, don't I feel silly. Turns out that Wifi was enabled on the Windows machine. As soon as I disabled it, SAMBA transfer speeds jumped up to ~11.1MB/s.

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  • You can accept your own answer if you want to. Nov 20, 2019 at 20:20

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