Networking and servers • Re: Slow transfer speeds on a shared USB drive on Pi5

Does you USB drive/adapter have a Jmicron chipset? Those are know to be problematic under Linux unless you disable UAS.*

Further:

• Is it plugged in to a USB 3 port?
• What's the network performance like with protocols other than smb?
• What filesystem has the drive been formatted with? Some are slower than others.
• Just the share definition isn't enough to help with your Samba config. Post the output from testparm -s (as text not as an image) and wrap it in code tags.

Next, your fstab entry and choice of mount point are poor.
On the mount point: the usual location for a mount point for something that is to be shared is under /srv not under / so in this case /srv/usbshare
On your fstab entry:

• It's better to use PARTUUID, UUID, or LABEL rather than device node (/dev/sda1). If you later add another drive the mapping between device node and physical drive can change across reboots.
• Don't use auto for the fstype. It could guess wrong or even if it guesses correctly it could use the wrong driver (for example, there are three possible drivers for NTFS).

Some suggested reading:
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
[shameless self promotion]
Building A Pi Based NAS
Using fstab A Beginner's Guide
[/shameless self promotion]

*: USB Attached SCSI. See viewtopic.php?t=245931

Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Fri Aug 15, 2025 2:35 pm

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