eSATA drive success anyone?

[bad_gui]

Hi,

I have a guruplug server plus and tried to use a 1TB USB drive that is NTFS formatted.
Disk read write was abysmal from a Vista laptop 100 kb/sec: likely a combination of wireless
connection, SAMBA and ntfs-3g driver.

There is a lot of data on this NTFS drive so I can't reformat.  I looked at buying an eSATA drive
since this is supposed to give better I/O than USB2.0.  I would format a new drive as ext3 and
keep it on the Plug.

Can anyone recommend an eSATA drive model?  Reviews are mixed for all of the devices I looked at.

Another option I came across is Cloud Appliances.  These have an embedded system allowing
connection from LAN or WAN.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822186281&cm_sp=Cat_Hard_Drives-_-Spotlight-_-22-186-281

If I plug this into my router I via ethernet cable, I could simplify the setup of NAS compared to configuring Guruplug.
However, I don't know how customizable the settings are.  There seemed to be some restriction on connections.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822186281&cm_sp=Cat_Hard_Drives-_-Spotlight-_-22-186-281

Advice anyone?

[spinifex]

FWIW, I have a relatively old Seagate (ST3250310AS) SATA drive that I use with a Dreamplug. Performance is great.
Fast enough that I have never been prompted to measure the speed. I am not sure about the differences with SATA on a Guruplug.

[cbxbiker61]

Hi,

I have a guruplug server plus and tried to use a 1TB USB drive that is NTFS formatted.
Disk read write was abysmal from a Vista laptop 100 kb/sec: likely a combination of wireless
connection, SAMBA and ntfs-3g driver.

Advice anyone?

Ntfs-3g performance on a Sheeva variation would not be too good.  Ntfs-3g runs through FUSE in userspace, so there is a a lot of data moving from kernelspace to userspace and back to kernelspace.   Then add on the fact that Samba is running in userspace so the data move into userspace once again and then back to kernel space to go out the wire.  The little arm processor just can't handle that very effectively.  Linus (not very delicately) said FUSE is a toy.  I don't entirely agree, but with respect to performance he's absolutely right.

There would be a HUGE difference in performance moving to any native linux filesystem.

USB2 is going to cap at about 25M/sec.  If you need faster than that you have to use e-SATA.

An ideal situation would be to use e-SATA, a linux native filesystem and nfs (personally I prefer nfs4).  You'd have very few kernelspace to userspace transitions.

[bad_gui]

I tried using a USB 1TB external drive and the performance is poor.  It is mounted
async on a guruplug.

/dev/sdc1 on /media/usb1 type ext2 (rw,noexec,nodev,noatime)

usb 1-1.2: new high speed USB device using orion-ehci and address 4
scsi2 : usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0
scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WD       My Passport 0740 1003 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
scsi 2:0:0:1: Enclosure         WD       SES Device       1003 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] Spinning up disk...
scsi 2:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 13
.ready
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] 1953458176 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 47 00 10 08


#time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/usb1/test bs=1M count=40
40+0 records in
40+0 records out
41943040 bytes (42 MB) copied, 6.42462 s, 6.5 MB/s

real    0m6.432s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.320s


Any ideas why it is only 6.5 MB/sec?  Why is this much lower than 25 MB/sec?

[pietsnot]

try with these options:
/dev/sdd3 on /media/usb1 type ext3 (rw,noexec,nodev,sync,noatime,nodiratime)

[pacolm]

Hi,

 Results of the same test in my guruplug, the esata disk is not mounted, is the booting disk, I do not know if this could make such difference (almost 10x faster!):

root@guru-esata:~# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=1M count=40                          
40+0 records in
40+0 records out
41943040 bytes (42 MB) copied, 0.734095 s, 57.1 MB/s

real    0m0.801s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.250s

Regards,

PacoLM

[bad_gui]

I changed the mount options suggested (actually I tried it with sync and got 4.9MB/sec)

When I changed the suggestion to async I get

# umount /dev/sdc1

# mount -o rw,noexec,nodev,async,noatime,nodiratime /dev/sdc1 /media/usb1

# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/usb1/test bs=1M count=40
40+0 records in
40+0 records out
41943040 bytes (42 MB) copied, 0.320133 s, 131 MB/s

real    0m0.449s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.320s

That's more like it! 

Now to get udev to not mount the drive with the default settings.

If I understand correctly, external drives don't spin up fast enough for fstab to mount
them so they get mounted with the udev rules for external drives.

[superpat]

Hi

I notice that the drives that appear slow are 1 TB  in size.

Might the problem be the dreaded 4K block size  and start sector alignment format problem?

I am not going to regurgitate the whole sorry saga here,  if you wish to learn more then Google it!

regards

Patrick