> "good enough" for many uses.

I've been unable to see any difference between writing to my USB2
external Maxtor OneTouch drive and the system's internal ATA100/133
disks over a 100Mbps network. USB2 should be able to keep up with
light (2, maybe 3 or 4 computers) accessing the drive via a 10/100
network, but USB2 won't be able to keep pace with even one gigabit
network. For home networks that are only running 10/100 or wireless
and have only a small handful of clients, I don't see any reason why
USB2 based storage couldn't keep up.

Performance can also depend on your USB2 host hardware. I tried a
cheap PCI USB2 addon card in an old computer to run my backups, and
performance was less than stellar. The drive would mount up fine and I
could format it and copy data to and from it. All was going well, but
when BackupPC started pulling in data things went south. Write speed
started fine but declined as activity continued and eventually the
hard drive would disconnect from the USB2 bus with a number of errors
written to the system console. I replaced the cheap USB2 noname card
with a slightly more expensive Adaptec branded USB2 card and all the
problems went away.


-- 
Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us
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