usb2 and external hard disk

[Tony Maher]

Hello,

I had the need to transfer a 150Gb file and the network between buildings
was way too slow (est. 96 hours), so I looked at an external USB disk to connect
to my laptop.  I could not find too much on the lists but decided to try a
Maxtor 200Gb firewire/USB external disk.  I compiled in ehci device (experimental yes),
plugged device in and it recognized it ok.

  FreeBSD k9 5.2-CURRENT FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT #1: Thu Dec 18 22:47:13 EST 2003 

  Dec 19 08:34:27 k9 kernel: umass0: Maxtor OneTouch, rev 2.00/2.00, addr 2
  Dec 19 08:34:27 k9 kernel: umass0: Get Max Lun not supported (STALLED)
  Dec 19 08:34:27 k9 kernel: GEOM: create disk da0 dp=0xc2da6450
  Dec 19 08:34:27 k9 kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
  Dec 19 08:34:27 k9 kernel: da0: <Maxtor OneTouch 0200> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device 
  Dec 19 08:34:27 k9 kernel: da0: 1.000MB/s transfers
  Dec 19 08:34:27 k9 kernel: da0: 194480MB (398295040 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 24792C)

Trying to mount it and got:

  Dec 19 08:35:36 k9 kernel: mountmsdosfs(): disk too big, sorry

Someone else previously reported this on the list.
So turned it into a UFS disk, mounted it and it worked perfectly.

I was a little worried given the 1MB/s message but it transferred the file
from Sun server via ftp to my laptop Compaq N610c (usb2 but no firewire)
and had transfer rate hitting either wire maximum (100Mb/s full duplex)
or CPU limits (Sun server was busy).

Later tests with bonnie showed:

Version 1.93c       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
Concurrency   1     -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
k9               1G    90  94  7866   4  4449   2   183  96 10597   4  66.6   3
Latency               255ms     166ms     905ms   58076us   55577us   38370ms
Version 1.93c       ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
k9                  -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  5985  37 +++++ +++ 30524  90  2443  15 25004  67 30076  94
Latency               651ms   13733us   32923us    2696ms     193ms   12609us

(manual states for first 10x power ons, disk verifies writes so they are slower than reads,
so expect it should be a little faster in future).

Kudos and thanks to the USB (and CAM) guys!  Very impressive and very useful!

cheers
--
tonym