USB 2.0 Disk - 24 hours to write 300GB

B

Baredor

Gawd
Joined
Jun 30, 2004
Messages
667
I just can't believe that this is normal. I've got a 500gig WD external drive and am attempting to use NTbackup to backup 304 GB. The time to complete this is right around 24 hours. :eek: I installed a SIIG USB 2.0 PCI controller card in a PCI-X slot. Drivers are default Windows 2000 Server SP4. Enhanced USB shows up in device manager, albeit with 1999 dates from MS.

Specs:

Dell Powervault 725N
P4 2.0
512
4 IDEs in a software RAID (I know, I know. I said :rolleyes: too.)
500gig WD external

I knew I wouldn't get 480Mb/s - I'm not that crazy, but I never expected it to be this ridiculously slow. I have turned off compression and indexing on the drive, and no improvement. Called WD and they were somewhat surprised, but had no help. Now, I know this machine needs more RAM, we're on that, but CPU usage is spiking to only 60%, usually around 30. The RAID doesn't seem to be pounded either when I'm trying to backup. I can't find the bottleneck here. Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Edit: Something I forgot to mention - ANY access to the drive seems sluggish. Right click, explore, anything just feels so very slow. Given the drive specs, I may be an idiot, but I'm a stumped idiot:

Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 16 MB
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)

Seek Times
Read Seek Time 8.9 ms
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)
Click to expand...
 
you are getting ~3.6 MiB/s which is faster than USB1.1, but slower than the ~20 MiB/s you should be getting.
 
I don't suppose this might be a factor? :confused:

USB.jpg
 
Is windows backup compressing your stuff as it sends it over or something ? Stopwatch a 100 MB file transfer and check for yourself how fast it's going.
 
Demon_of_The_Fall said:
Is windows backup compressing your stuff as it sends it over or something ? Stopwatch a 100 MB file transfer and check for yourself how fast it's going.
Click to expand...

We did have compression enabled on the drive itself, but I have since disabled it and it made no difference. As for NTbackup, no compression there either:
compress.jpg


I copied over a 50MB file from local RAID to the USB drive and it was at a normal speed - 2.5 - 3 seconds or so. So that leaves me wondering what the problem is with NTbackup. :(
 
So the problem probably isn't STR off the raid array. What about creating a zip file onto the external disk (make sure you set the "temporary folder location" or whatever your archiver calls it onto the array) and see how fast that is?

 
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