Steve Thompson wrote: > On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote: > >> Steve Thompson wrote: >>> On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Scott Ehrlich wrote: >>> >>>> I have a client with a handful of USB drives connected to a CentOS >>>> box. I am charged with binding the USB drives together into a single >>>> LVM for a cheap storage data pool (10 x 1 TB usb drives = 10 TB cheap >>>> storage in a single mount point). >>> I tried doing this for fun once upon a time, using 6 1TB drives. I can >>> save you a lot of grief by suggesting that you don't think about this any >>> further. Boy is it slow. And extremely unreliable. And slow. Don't even do >>> it for backups. Did I say it was slow? >> Please qualify 'slow'. Was it dog slow, turtle-slow, snail-slow or >> slowaris slow? > > Slower than all of those. Top write speed I could ever achieve with a > USB-2 interface and SATA drives was 20 MB/sec with a trailing wind, and > usually half of that, with a single stream. I even tried USB-1 for more > laughs; 1 MB/sec on a truly good day. With multiple writers, performance > dropped so far as to be unusable (below 1 MB/sec). And we're talking mkfs > times in _days_. The host was a CentOS 5.2 box, 32-bit. Kudos to Steve for proving that USB2's 480mbits/sec is really just a sham. Now I wonder if you can daisy chain IEEE1394 devices...or try out eSATA...:-P