I bought a 2TB Seagate USB3 external hard drive for $120 from Costco, as a backup drive for my wife's office. I also bought a $26 PCIe x1 USB3 dual port card from Plugable via Amazon: http://plugable.com/products/pcie-usb3-sp/
The combination is wicked fast. I hacked a little C program to write a gigabyte of 512 byte buffers to a randomly named file, rename it (to evade kernel caching), then read it back. On the internal SATA-2 drive, the program wrote at about 43 MB/s, and read back at 19 MB/s. On the USB3 drive, it wrote at 112 MB/s, and read back at 75 MB/s, about three times faster. Plugable is very Linux friendly (they provide FAQs and tech support for users with Linux issues). This card is plug-and-play for 2.6.31 and newer kernels. Of course, you need a motherboard new enough to have PCIe slots. I am also tempted to buy a Plugable $20 ExpressCard/34 USB3 interface for my laptop (or talk John Jordan into getting one for himself), and see how fast that operates. Office Max has what appears to be the same 2TB drive (not sure) for $110, on sale from the normal $170. Also 4GB USB flash drives for $6. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
