USB transfer speed never exceeds 4.5 MB/s

[koltrast]

Hello fellow Sheeva owners!

I am having a problem regarding the transfer speed from and to my usb hard drive connected to the sheeva plug. When transfering over the network from one computer to the sheeva plug, at its best I manage to transfer at rates around 4.5 MB/s, both ways. When the harddrive is hooked up straight to a normal PC running linux I max around 11 MB/s.

I have checked the following:

*My drive is recognized as a hi-speed usb device.
*By running hdparm -tT /dev/sda1 I get the following results for the usb drive:
   /dev/sda1:
   Timing cached reads:   688 MB in  2.00 seconds = 343.72 MB/sec
   Timing buffered disk reads:  92 MB in  3.04 seconds =  30.27 MB/sec

*When running iperf I get this:
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 Server listening on TCP port 5001
 TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 ip[  4] local 192.168.0.199 port 5001 connected with 192.168.0.198 port 55227
 [ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
 [  4]  0.0-10.1 sec    111 MBytes  92.8 Mbits/sec

* I have tried a usb memory stick instead of my harddrive and I get the same speed of 4.5 MB/s.

By doing this I am pretty sure that I can say my problem doesn't have to do with my home network or the transfer speed of the USB disk. But still while moving a file from another computer in the network to the sheeva plug I get lousy speed. I have tried transfering from other machines to the sheeva and the speed doesn't change.

Just to be sure to have supplied every bit of information:

*My router is a D-link dir-855
*My harddrive is a WD MyPassport 1TB USB 3.0 - formatted in ext3. Mounted with "mount -o async,noatime /dev/sda1 /path/to/drive"
*My kernel on the plug is: 2.6.32-trunk-kirkwood
*My sheeva plug is a year old. But these usb speed issues has always been present.

Does anyone know of anything I can do to make things transfer faster?

I am grateful for your advice and thank you in advance!

[peter a]

are you on gigibit or 100mb .

Because 11MB/sec is slow for gigabit and max in out 100
Mbit

[koltrast]

Hi Peter a,

11MB/s is my usb transfer speed when the harddrive is hooked up to a normal work station through usb running linux. I have a 100 Mbit network that I get around 93 Mbit/s in transfer speed (see info in my first post).

My network speed is fine. The transfer speed from and to the disk locally on the plug seems to be fine too (see first post) but when transferring from one computer on my network to the usb drive hooked up to the sheeva plug I get 4.5 MB/s.

Do you have any idea what the problem could be?

[birdman]

What network file-transfer protocol are you using?

[peter a]

I do know if your drive is formatted NTFS , it is very very slow .

I get about 35 MB/sec with usb and 55 MB/sec with Esata ( ex3 ), but about 3.5 MB/sec with anything NTFS.

[koltrast]

birdman: So far it has been over ssh. Maybe this is a bad idea? Later today or tomorrow I will try mounting with nfs to see if I get any better results. I had'nt given this a thought, seems kind of evident that it could be encryption with ssh that slows things down?

peter a: As I stated in my first post the drive is formatted in ext3.

[koltrast]

Solution: I mounted the drive with NFS and now have transferspeeds around 8.5 MB/s which is satisfying. Thanks birdman for pointing me in the right direction.
To learn more about NFS I read this:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNFSHowTo

[birdman]

So far it has been over ssh.

So the data is being encrypted before/decrypted after it's sent.

[Abra]

FTP (or much more secure FTPS) gives best performance for network file transfer (it's in the name!).

[jspencer1157]

Solution: I mounted the drive with NFS and now have transferspeeds around 8.5 MB/s which is satisfying. Thanks birdman for pointing me in the right direction.
To learn more about NFS I read this:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNFSHowTo

Thanks for the info good read!