If the file-system on which your IPFS repo is stored is the issue, it may be worth trying one of the other IPFS storage backends, such as pebbleds. See Kubo CLI | IPFS Docs
It might also be worth trying to stress the file-system by using flatfs: if that doesn’t change the observed behaviour then it is probably not the performance of the IPFS repo and/or its backing store that is limiting you.
I have done some reading and there used to be some general performance caveats [1]. Have these been fixed?
I started that thread! I’m pleased to say that the network transfer speeds have improved dramatically since I posted that. Where I used to get ~5 MiB/s I now frequently see 50-70 MiB/s.
That said, I have been experiencing occasional hangs in transfers.