On Friday, April 20, 2012 10:54:51 AM Les Mikesell wrote: > The CPU has to do the work of the transfer over usb - which is why it > is cheap. Real disk controllers use DMA without a lot of CPU > involvement. And this includes USB 3.0, incidentally. I have found that on my Fedora 14 (soon to be C6) laptop with a USB 3.0 ExpressCard interface that the load is less on USB 3 and it is on the laptops built-in USB 2 ports. YMMV.