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

[Hans Petter Selasky]

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.

--HPS