Robert wrote:

Peter Farrow wrote:

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).

I back up weekly to a Maxtor OneTouch (original) USB2-connected hard drive. This happens while I sleep but it looks like last Wednesday morning, it took 36 minutes to to copy 19GB.

   [root@mavis ~]# du -hs /media/OTOT/2005-11-30
   19G     /media/OTOT/2005-11-30
   [root@mavis ~]#

   [rj@mavis ~]$ cat backup_progress_2005-11-30
   Wed Nov 30 02:02:07 CST 2005 Removing /media/OTOT/2005-11-09
   Backup to /media/OTOT/2005-11-30 Started at Wed Nov 30 02:06:13 CST 2005
   Wed Nov 30 02:06:14 CST 2005 Completed: /bin
   Wed Nov 30 02:06:15 CST 2005 Completed: /boot
   <snip>
   Wed Nov 30 02:42:14 CST 2005 Completed: /var
   Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
   /dev/sdb2            152206916 132579164  11896072  92% /media/OTOT
   /dev/sdb2 successfully  unmounted from /media/OTOT
   All Finished at Wed Nov 30 02:42:14 CST 2005
                                  Looks like that averages out to about 8.8MB/sec
I'm running an Athlon 2600+, 2GHz, 512MB on an ASUS A7N8X.
I hope this helps.

No, not at all. What's the setup?
How is the USB configured?
How's the drive configured, formatted ext3, vfat...

[root@mavis log]# uname -r
2.6.9-22.0.1.EL
[root@mavis log]# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0764:0005 Cyber Power System, Inc. Cyber Power UPS
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 045e:0040 Microsoft Corp. Wheel Mouse Optical
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 011: ID 0d49:7010 Maxtor
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 03f0:3404 Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 6122
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 1267:0103 Logic3 / SpectraVideo plc
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05e3:0605 Genesys Logic, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0409:0059 NEC Corp. HighSpeed Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
[root@mavis log]# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 163.9 GB, 163927556096 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         678     5446003+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2             679       19929   154633657+  83  Linux
[root@mavis log]# 

for dir in bin boot etc home initrd lib lost+found misc opt root \
           sbin selinux srv tftpboot \
           usr var ; do
  find /$dir -depth -print0 | cpio --null -pmd $UD/$DT
  echo `date` Completed: /$dir >>$PF
done