After much research I finally found that OpenFiler only configures USB devices at a 1.1 level and not 2.0 which is why the throughput is so low. If I want to use USB drives I'll have to setup a standard Linux system and share out the drives on it. Thanks everyone for your suggestions. On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Donovan <dniesen at gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:58 PM, James <jucziz6 at gmail.com> wrote: >> Over the years I have purchase a couple of the low cost USB NAS solutions >> that Linksys has come out with. These units use an ARM processor and a mini >> linux kernel. For the most part they work but, they are slow and if I try >> to un-tar a file on the unit back to itself it will lock up. I thought I'd >> move the drives to OpenFiler and away from the ARM processor. I setup >> OpenFiler, configured it with a multiport USB card and connected a new drive >> to it. Then I started moving files to it, the performance was below the >> charts. The ARM units were typically twice as fast as OpenFiler. The >> OpenFiler system was practically idle from what I could see in top, >> accessing the drive from the system had some issues as well. >> >> Does anyone have any experience with OpenFiler and USB drives or performance >> tuning it? >> >> Thank >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> > > > USB is going to be a bottleneck no matter what; why not crack those > drives open and hook them up to a SATA/IDE interface instead? > > If you need to stick with USB I would check to make sure that they are > operating at the full 2.0 speed. Maybe run hdparm -t on each disk and > see that you're getting somewhere around 20MB/s. > > > -- > Donovan Niesen >