Taring my mp3 collection from 2.5in 500MB internal sata drive (sda) to esata 3.5in 500MB drive (sdb) and it seems slow. In vmstat i can see that the external drive writes faster than the internal can read (external has periods of inactivity) # time tar cf /mnt/usbdrive/mp3back.tar mp3/
real 10m9.679s user 0m1.577s sys 2m1.769s # du -ks mp3/ 21221661 mp3/ So 21221MB in 610 seconds = 35 MB/s # hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 220 MB in 3.01 seconds = 73.14 MB/sec (77 with --direct) FWIW; # hdparm /dev/sda /dev/sda: multcount = 16 (on) IO_support = 1 (32-bit) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 256 (on) geometry = 60801/255/63, sectors = 976773168, start = 0 So the should i expect filesystem (reiser3) and other overhead to cut the read performance to less than half of what hdparm reports? Anything else i can look at to speed it up? Im using CFQ io scheduler.
