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

On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:04:36 +0200
Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky_at_c2i.net> 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.
> 
> Maybe there are some utilities in /usr/ports that can read NTFS faster than 
> the kernel NTFS driver.
> 

You could try /usr/ports/sysutils/fusefs-ntfs.

---
Gary Jennejohn