[CentOS] slow usb hard disk performance.

Mon Dec 5 10:15:22 UTC 2005
Peter Farrow <peter at farrows.org>

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.