Performance problem with external USB disk

[Joppe]

Hall all,

Maybe have someone here experince the same problem I have with my expternal USB2.0 disk that I want to connect to my SuSE laptop.

The problem is that the write speed is extremly slow, read is okay but super good.

The question is if it is a filesystem problem, have tested with ext3, ext2, reiserfs, jfs and with all is the same problem.

Have any suggestions what filesystem give me the best performance?

Thanks in advance

Joppe

[Vincent Fleming]

Are you sure you have a USB2.0 port on your computer?

The older ones really stink for disk access.

[Bryan Eley]

Offhand I would think ext3 would give the best performance overall since it does not do the index builds that reiser does.

As for the write speed, I've seen various reviews on different usb disks reporting on slow write speeds, making it sound like it's more of a controller/drive housing issue than an issue with the drive itself. You might try using hdparm or else sdparm utility to see if you can't improve drive read/write performance.

For example, "hdparm -t /dev/sdb" (replace /sdb with the location of your usb drive)should give you some idea of the drive performance.

Hope this helps a bit!
Bryan

[Joppe]

Hallo, and thanks for the input.

Yes, it is USB2.0 I have on my laptop, but late yesterday evening did I get a clue what the problem is, it is my SuSE 9.2 that mounts the disk as sync, which makes it really slow, the suggestion is to mount the disk as async instead. At the SuSE forum have they solutions how to solve this for version 9.3 and 10 but they don't work on the 9.2 version.

My problem now are find out how to do it, because when I mount it manually, then the hotplug comes in and I gets to mounts when I run df -k and it is in sync mode. I could stop the hotplug, but I would prefere to have it so my USB memory-stick mounts auto when I plug it in.

Have tested to add it in fstab, don't help because the hotplugs settings comes instead.

Have tested to edit the /etc/hotplug/hotplug.subfs.functions and set it to async but that does not either work.

Would be happy for more help to solve this.