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  • system freezes requiring reboot when trying to transfer a large archive

    From Juan Bertinand@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 13 17:25:42 2025
    I run a dual boot Ubuntu 22.04/ Win 10 system, selectable at boot up in
    Grub. However, recently I am experiencing a mystery problem. I
    recently downloaded a 25 GB archive of a former forum I belonged to.
    The first thing needing done is unzipping the archive after download,
    but that's not the problem. While I can download the archive onto one
    of my external 500 MB USB hard drives, and unzip it, if I then try and
    transfer this to one of my 4 TB "master" hard drives, my entire system
    will freeze at some point requiring reboot.

    Other than the hard drives within my system, all of my external USB hard
    drives are NOT SSD (HDDs), and are 2.5" size. I seem to be able to
    transfer the 25 GB archive from one of the smaller USB drives to another
    (1TB or less in size), but the trouble starts when trying to use the
    larger 4 TB masters.

    The freezing happened three times and I had to use Win 10 to repair the
    drives (easier for me to just boot into Win and do the repairs). For
    now, I'm going to store the three archive back up copies on my smaller 1
    TB or less USB drives, but still wondering why my system is freezing
    while using the 4 TB drives and this large archive. In all other
    respects, the 4 TB drives have given no problems over the years. None
    of the drive need external power and are USB 2/3.

    Thank you.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul@21:1/5 to Juan Bertinand on Sun Jul 13 18:30:16 2025
    On Sun, 7/13/2025 5:25 PM, Juan Bertinand wrote:
    I run a dual boot Ubuntu 22.04/ Win 10 system, selectable at boot up in Grub.  However, recently I am experiencing a mystery problem.  I recently downloaded a 25 GB archive of a former forum I belonged to. The first thing needing done is unzipping
    the archive after download, but that's not the problem.  While I can download the archive onto one of my external 500 MB USB hard drives, and unzip it, if I then try and transfer this to one of my 4 TB "master" hard drives, my entire system will freeze
    at some point requiring reboot.

    Other than the hard drives within my system, all of my external USB hard drives are NOT SSD (HDDs), and are 2.5" size.  I seem to be able to transfer the 25 GB archive from one of the smaller USB drives to another (1TB or less in size), but the
    trouble starts when trying to use the larger 4 TB masters.

    The freezing happened three times and I had to use Win 10 to repair the drives (easier for me to just boot into Win and do the repairs).  For now, I'm going to store the three archive back up copies on my smaller 1 TB or less USB drives, but still
    wondering why my system is freezing while using the 4 TB drives and this large archive.  In all other respects, the 4 TB drives have given no problems over the years.  None of the drive need external power and are USB 2/3.

    Thank you.

    You would think that the behavior and values are tuned by humans, for various usage scenarios, for good results. Who can say why this is not working correctly.

    https://askubuntu.com/questions/1335363/slow-write-speeds-when-writing-onto-usb-flash-drives

    https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=000017857

    To put those values into a system's permanent configuration, edit /etc/sysctl.conf with:

    vm.dirty_bytes = 629145600
    vm.dirty_background_bytes = 314572800

    A question would be then, "how much RAM does this computer have?".

    Paul

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to Juan Bertinand on Tue Jul 15 19:43:05 2025
    On Sun, 13 Jul 2025 17:25:42 -0400, Juan Bertinand wrote:

    The freezing happened three times and I had to use Win 10 to repair the drives (easier for me to just boot into Win and do the repairs).

    Are you using NTFS on that drive, for some reason?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)