[TriLUG] external USB drive is slow

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Alan Porter wrote:

> This week, I bought a "Penguin Gear" external USB drive enclosure
> and I put a 250 GB hard drive in it.  It really looks sharp.  I

> It ran and ran and ran.  It took 12 HOURS to copy 31 GB!!!  All
> the time, the system load was between 2.5 and 3.0, but "top"
> showed 99.0% idle.

What Linux distribution, and, more importantly, kernel version are you 
running?

When I bought my first external USB/FW hard drive enclosures for video capture 
they failed to work sufficiently on older 2.4 based kernels because of the way 
it handles usb/scsi i/o operations... Upgrading to a later version of Fedora 
with a 2.6 kernel cured my problems..

I'd be interested in seeing of someone can recommending a fair disk benchmark 
program that some of us could run on our systems to compare.. I haven't done 
this in years, but truly enjoyed it with kernels many years ago...

ps. sorry I can't be more helpful, but no, it shouldn't take 12 hours to copy 
31 gigs..

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Maxwell Spangler
Chapel Hill, North Carolina