Hello all,

I have a triple-boot system I recently built from an older ASUS Republic of Gamers Formula IV Crossfire MB that is giving me some USB file transfer issues. Some system spec info:

ASUS RoG Formula IV Crossfire motherboard w/AMD Phenom II x4 965 CPU@3.4ghz, ASUS R9/270 PCIex16 2gbDDR5 GPU card, 16gb PC12800 (1600) RAM, Corsair 600M PSU, Samsung EVO 850 250gb SSD (boot drive), SilverStone PCIe USB 3.0 card (for case mount front USB 3.0, and 5tb Toshiba SATA III HDD (data drive). The MB has 2 USB 3.0 ports on the back panel and 6 USB 2.0, and 2 more USB 2.0 ports on the case front panel connected to a MB header.

The 3 OS's I have installed are: Kali Linux 2.0, LXLE 14.04.2, and Win7SP1, with GRUB2 as the bootloader.

I have a 1tb 2.5" USB 3.0 (Toshiba) external drive I use for data backups; it is currently almost full. I also have a 128gb USB 3.0 USB Key (PNY) that I use for transferring files. When I try to copy files between these two devices on any of the USB ports (it doesn't matter which ones, front or rear panel, 2.0 or 3.0 or mixed), I have issues. So, here goes.....In Kali Linux 2.0, when I try to copy a folder (named "Pictures") of about 10.8gb of pictures (many relatively small files) and some videos, the system encounters errors at about 600mb. I get the following error:

Replace file""? An older file with the same name already exists in "Pictures". Replacing it will overwrite it's content. It then lists a file of Size "Null", last modified "Null". Regardless of what I do (overwrite, skip, etc.), I then get this error: Error while copying the file into /media/root/0012-D687/Pictures. If I open the "Show more details" dropdown, I get this: Error opening file '/media/root/0012-D687/Pictures/Image007.jpg': File exists.

I got it, the OS thinks there is already a file of that name, but....The weird thing is, there is no file with the same name on the device I'm copying to (in this case, I'm copying from the 1tb HDD to the 128gb USB key), and it's listing a file of "Null" size and last modified date of "null". Even the thumbnails don't match - the "Null" file has no thumbnail, the picture file I'm trying to copy does.

I can manually rename each file and it will continue to copy, but it finds about 40+ files like this, and renaming each during the copy process is arduous. Can anyone explain WHY it seems to think there is a file of the same name already in the folder it is creating on the destination device?

In addition, if I boot into either LXLE or Win7, I don't have this same issue (I tried copying the same exact folder, from the same device and to the same device, with no issues. After each time I try this as a test, I send the entire copied folder to trash and then empty the trash also). I did notice in LXLE it took 43 minutes to copy 10.8gb of pictures on the USB 3.0 ports (from the 1tb HDD to the 128gb USB key)!!! That seems awfully slow to me. Win7 took somewhere around 15 minutes or so, ~12mb/s if I'm calculating properly - which certainly isn't fast either. Kali reports about 20-30mb/s when it's copying. I'm certain on the EXACT Win7 time, as I didn't actually time it (estimated), so it may have actually been closer to 10 minutes (making it ~18-20mb/s). USB 2.0 should be able to transfer at up to 60mb/s, and 3.0 even faster (of course, the limit here is the HDD transfer speed, not USB). Transferring files to my 5tb data drive (SATA III) results in +70mb/s (initial peak of almost 200mb/s, then slowly drops off). Interestingly, my USB 3.0 PNY key transfers (write) at ~20mb/s thru the USB 3.0 ports on the front panel.....also seems slow. Haven't tried the backl port 3.0 or any USB 2.0 ports for comparison yet. Read speeds are about double that, still seems rather slow to me for a USB 3.0 device....I guess I need to do some more benchmarking...and this is all under Kali, no benchmarks for LXLE or Win7 other than what I specified already.

So, 2 different issues under 2 different versions of linux. I'm no linux expert, so I'm really not sure where to start with troubleshooting why I'm having these two issues. The first issue (duplicate filenames) is not a big deal, I can just skip them all or rename them easily enough, but it's a bit perplexing. The speed issue in LXLE though, that is totally unacceptable.

Both distros (Kali and LXLE) are Debian-based (well, LXLE is Lubuntu-based, and Lubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is Debian-based). Output from uname -r in Kali is: 4.0.0-kali1-amd64

LXLE is based on kernal v3.16 I think (since I'm writing this while booted into Kali, I can't really check it to be 100% sure; or, at least, I don't know HOW to do it if it CAN be done).

Any thoughts on this? Suggestions for benchmarking or things to check? Thanks in advance, sorry for the lengthy post!

THe speed limit is usually not depending on the hardware limit of the devices.

If that is true, then what is the limiting factor?

The theoretical limit for USB 2.0 is 480Mbit/s, or 60Mbyte/s. USB 3.0 has a theoretical maximum of 5Gbit/s, or 625Mbyte/s, correct? So, if an external USB 3.0 hard drive is connected to a USB 3.0 port, the maximum transfer speed is 625Mbytes/s, but if the actual hard disk inside the drive enclosure transfers at a maximum of 80Mbytes/s, and that is the slowest component, then that is the maximum transfer speed based off the hardware limitations of the drive. As a general rule, flash memory is much faster than spinning hard drives, so in my case (USB 3.0 2.5" 1tb external drive vs. 128gb USB 3.0 flash drive) the flash drive should out-perform the hard drive, but that's not the case.

I ran a benchmark using "Disks" (read only, no write), and I noticed 2 things:

1) hard drive performance slowly degrades as the drive is accessed ("drops off")
2) my USB key has drop-outs and seems to "hang" a few times during the test, which I think is odd.

I also remember that every time I plugged the USB key into a Windows machine, a box popped up asking me if I wanted to fix the drive. I just transferred all the data off it and am now reformatting it as FAT (overwrite mode, so it will be completely erased), and will re-test once that is complete to compare. I suspect that will fix it. If not, then I suspect the key is defective.

be warned !!!
fat dose NOT support linux file permissions

this can cause problems for a very special single purpose OS like Kali


is this the MICROSOFT LIBRARY!!!! ( what they call a library) called the "pictures folder"

this is NOT a folder!!!
it is a collection of Microsoft system registry shortcuts
and not a real folder !!!!!!

Microsoft really DOSE NOT want people to actually KNOW !!! exactly where there files are
-- this keeps them "SHEEPLE"

C:\\Documents and settings \ "your user name" \Pictures
is not a real location
it is a link to
C:\\ Users" "your user name" \Pictures
BUT
"Pictures " is a library
so that can be a mix of PARTIAL or full folders ANYPLACE!!!!!! on any drive local OR NOT!!!

crack open
"regedit.exe"
and fallow the links in the registry ( you can hack the registry ?? right ?)


as to the long term support ubuntu 14.04
ntfs-3g is installed and using fuse

kali is a very special built OS for a single pouropse
you will need to manually mount a ntfs drive with custom mount commands

and if you make a non root user on kali
you might have problems doing that

@ John VV - it was not the windows "pictures" library, it was my own folder I created that I transferred pictures into so that is not the issue. Besides, how would I get the windows "pictures" library to actually copy to an external drive anyway, based on everything you said? Seems I wouldn't be able to, right? But thanks for the reply and details about that.

I know what Kali is for, that's why I installed it on my system. I normally use LXLE for general use, but I'm playing around with Kali to learn it. It shouldn't have issues copying files....

I've had no issues in Kali so far with NTFS volumes. They automount just fine, so if I need to use special mount commands or anything in Kali to read/write NTFS then I guess I'm just lucky. And just to be clear, it was FAT32, not FAT16, and again, I've never had issues with any Linux distro I've used with FAT32 volumes. I just reformatted the USB drive to NTFS so I can test it like that. The 1tb External drive was formatted NTFS already.

I know what the problem WAS, just not what the CAUSE was; the problem was that Kali thought there were files OF THE SAME NAME already on the folder that it was COPYING to the destination drive - how can that be (the CAUSE), when said folder DOESN'T ALREADY EXIST on the destination drive. I believe this to be a Kali issue, since I DO NOT have this issue in LXLE. I was easy enough to just skip all 43 files it THOUGHT were a name conflict, then go back and rename them all and copy them over, but I SHOULDN'T have had to do that. It makes no sense. I just wanted to see if anyone else ever had this type of issue before.

Anyway, I have some more testing I may do to see if maybe I can track down a little more details on the CAUSE, as it could be related to a difference in the kernel, drivers loaded, etc. between Kali and LXLE. I will also submit a bug report to the Kali team and see what happens.