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

[Drew Tomlinson]

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?

Thanks,

Drew

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