I run two versions of Linux. Kubuntu<br>7.04, and a recent version of Mandriva.<br><br>I recently acquired an external hard drive<br>housing, which takes IDE drives, and has<br>a USB 2 interface.<br><br>When I use it I mount it using the command
<br><br>mount -t ext3 /dev/X /disk2<br><br>and then proceed to transfer files. <br><br><br>Transfer them slowly that is. 21GB in about<br>6 hours, which works out to a little less than<br>8Mbps. This does involve moving tens of
<br>thousands of small files, which does slow<br>things down some, but not this much.<br><br>Going through the same motions under <br>Mandriva yields a transfer rate about 3X<br>higher, or about 24Mbps. I take it the<br>
default setting are different in some slightly<br>significant way.<br><br>Given the nominal USB 2 rate of 480Mbps,<br>this is not very impressive. One does not <br>of course expect anything close to the <br>480Mbps, but 80Mbps or so would seem to
<br>be closer to reasonable expectations. With<br>big files one even gets 70Mbps over a 100Mbps<br>Ethernet link.<br><br>Looking around online, it's clear this is a <br>widespread problem. The only solid lead I've
<br>seen is to somehow suppress the "sync" <br>function, which does seem to be standard.<br>It's clear how to do this using /etc/fstab, but<br>as shown above, I don't use that for now.<br><br>Does anyone have any tips or suggestions?
<br>While the transfers are robust, and in a <br>sense everything is working, the rates are <br>almost too slow to be of interest.<br><br> -Bob<br><br>