USB external Hard Disk Drive & Linux

stockhausen said:
The drive is currently connected through a Firewire 400 port rather than USB, FW400 seems to be about twice as fast as USB under SuSE 10.2 but still 5 times slower than Windows 2000. It is identified as /dev/sda1 and mounted as /media/disk.

hdparm -tT /dev/sda1 gives:
Timing cached reads: 1976 MB in 2.0 seconds = 987.54 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 70 MB in 3.08 seconds = 21.41 MB/sec

Reverting to USB gives pretty similar (read)figures:
a) Timing cached reads: 1952 MB in 2.0 seconds = 975.46 MB/sec
b) Timing cached reads: 1966 MB in 2.0 seconds = 982.44 MB/sec
c) Timing cached reads: 1982 MB in 2.0 seconds = 940.39 MB/sec
a) Timing buffered disk reads: 72 MB in 3.07 seconds = 23.44 MB/sec
b) Timing buffered disk reads: 72 MB in 3.05 seconds = 23.60 MB/sec
c) Timing buffered disk reads: 72 MB in 3.02 seconds = 23.81 MB/sec


hdparm -i /dev/sda1 gives HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Invalid argument

N.B. this is not an IDE drive, it is a SATA drive currently connected via Firewire
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I don't know if these will work on a SATA drive, but you could try hdparm /dev/sda1 and then enable DMA if it's not already with hdparm -d1 /dev/sda
if anything works run man hdparm for more info.

Check dmesg for a log of stuff that may be interesting. maybe watch what dmesg says when you plug the drive in to the system.

Otherwise I would check out the firewire card and drivers, maybe it's a known problem. I read something about sbp2 module that can affect FW. Not sure how relevant that is though.

I rather wonder whether using ext3 may be causing the problem, would I be better off using ext2?
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Uniikely I would have thought.

Do you have any idea whether there is anything equivalent under Linus? Incidentally, I don't mean 'top' which doesn't provide data on Disk I/O.
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Not a monitor, but bonnie++ benchmarks /disks/filesystems.
 
I have now loaded Fedora 7 and the time taken to copy files to the external USB drive are as I would expect them to be (very much faster than SuSE 10.2), so I guess that it must be a problem with SuSE.
 
Sues Tends to be a little bloated perhaps thats whats slowing it down. try a Dame Small Linux Boot CD as that distro is porbably one of the lightest around.
 
I know you have already chosen ext3 over FAT32, but here's something I happened across at work today, which would support your ext3 choice. I never knew such a thing existed!

http://www.fs-driver.org/

Allows you to read and write to ext2 and ext3 from Windows. From what I have seen it seems to work well enough.
 
beatvar said:
I know you have already chosen ext3 over FAT32, but here's something I happened across at work today, which would support your ext3 choice. I never knew such a thing existed!

http://www.fs-driver.org/

Allows you to read and write to ext2 and ext3 from Windows. From what I have seen it seems to work well enough.
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already mentioned in a post further up.

but it is good.
 
FWIW - I've had USB drives up to 1.5TB on Linux. Works rather well - in fact drives over 1TB work better on Linux than they do on Windows. :)
 
Berserker said:
FWIW - I've had USB drives up to 1.5TB on Linux. Works rather well - in fact drives over 1TB work better on Linux than they do on Windows. :)
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In what way do they 'work better'? Are you talking about things like the LACIE Big disk drives? I have been using them recently and they are pretty nice drives.
 
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