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)<br>
# time tar cf /mnt/usbdrive/mp3back.tar mp3/<br><br>real    10m9.679s<br>user    0m1.577s<br>sys    2m1.769s<br># du -ks mp3/<br>21221661    mp3/<br><br>So 21221MB in 610 seconds = 35 MB/s<br><br># hdparm -t /dev/sda<br><br>
/dev/sda:<br> Timing buffered disk reads:  220 MB in  3.01 seconds =  73.14 MB/sec (77 with --direct)<br><br>FWIW;<br># hdparm /dev/sda<br><br>/dev/sda:<br> multcount     = 16 (on)<br> IO_support    =  1 (32-bit)<br> readonly      =  0 (off)<br>
 readahead     = 256 (on)<br> geometry      = 60801/255/63, sectors = 976773168, start = 0<br><br><br>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.<br>