Re: USB 2.0 External Drive - What Is A Reasonable Transfer Rate?

Hans Petter Selasky wrote:
On Thursday 23 July 2009 04:38:35 Drew Tomlinson wrote:
I have a USB 2.0 external drive that's formatted as NTFS under Windows
XP. I've plugged it into my 8.0 BETA2 install and am copying files to a
local raid1z zpool with one vdev consisting of 4 drives. I'm trying to
move about 100 GB of assorted files and have been at it all day. The
USB drive contains assorted files such as mp3, CD/DVD images, zip,
documents, etc. I'm guessing most files range between 1 - 4 MB with
some as large as 4 GB.

Anyway, iostat shows the transfer rate at around 2 - 3 MB per second.
Is this all I should expect from a USB 2.0 drive? Is there anything I
can do to speed this up?

Hi,

Benchmark your device like this:

dd if=/dev/daX of=/dev/null bs=65536

It will give you the correct transferrate number.

Thanks. When using your suggestion, iostat shows rate at almost 34 MB per second which seems reasonable.

When copying a large file to /dev/null as suggested by Erich Dollansky, I get right around 10 MB per second.

So does that mean that it's the NTFS driver that's causing the slowing?

Maybe there are some utilities in /usr/ports that can read NTFS faster than the kernel NTFS driver.

Maybe I'll have a look at /usr/ports/sysutils/fusefs-ntfs as suggested by Gary Jennejohn.

Thanks,

Drew

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