[CentOS] slow usb hard disk performance.

Dear All,

I tried a USB2 Maxtor One touch II external hard disk on a couple of my Centos 4.2 boxes and found it initiallised the SCSI subsystem ok and added device "sda". But the performance is miserable, yet the same hardware running XP the performance is satisfactory.

HDPARM gives results varying from 120k/sec to , at its peak 4.75M/s on a USB 2 machine, still very poor by any stretch.

On a twin CPU USB 1 machine it give a steady 1M/sec, which is consistently slow, which is better than erratically slow ( :-) )

Still dog slow, wondered if anyone has seen this, and wondered if the firewire interface would be better? (I need to get a cable to try this).

P.