Before I moved the drives to an actual IDE bus, I was sustaining about
4mb/s to it, and it caused relatively high cpu utilization,a nd drove
the system load up. This was with USB2. USB1.1 had an even higher cpu
utilization and virtually made the system un-usable during times of high
usb activity. I also tried firewire, and saw decreased system load,
increased throughput, however I had stability issues with it.

I personally wouldn't use USB or firewire for high storage needs. Yes it
is convenient and all, however, the performance just isn't worth it.
However USB is great for things like ipods, keyboards/mice, webcams and
printers, it doesn't perform very well under high load.

I have tried ext3, reiser, ext2, and vfat on large storage drives
connected via usb, and the file system didn't seem to increase or
decrease performance. 


Cheers,
~J
On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 10:50, rpgoldman at real-time.com wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone had any expertise to share about USB hard
> drives.  I'm finding that access to mine seems terribly slow; far
> slower than I think it ought to be.
> 
> I'm trying to use one as an external backup device.  Because I was
> careless, I didn't wipe the drive first (it was originally used as a
> backup device in a removable hard-drive drawer, before a recent
> upgrade), so have been deleting directories prior to copying stuff
> onto it, but this seems terribly, terribly slow.
> 
> For example:
> 
> rm -rf for 3 megabytes: 50 seconds
> rm -rf for 5.5 megabytes: 2 minutes 40 seconds!
> 
> At this rate my backups are going to be very time-consuming!
> 
> Is there some tuning or hdparming sort of thing I should do?
> 
> thanks,
> R
> 
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Jonathan Kline <klinej at msoe.edu>
Milwaukee School of Engineering


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