[NCLUG] USB 3.0 PCI cards

[Bob Proulx]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> Bill Thorson wrote:
> > backup devices.  I am currently using them on USB 2.0 because I have
> > no hardware with 3.0 ports.  I'd sure like to speed this up.  This
> 
> First of all, are you sure that USB 2.0 is your bottleneck here?  I'm sure
> these drives can more than saturate USB 2.0 when streaming large files, but
> for backups it often involves many files and a lot of seeking...  For
> ...

What types of drives are they?  For example at one site they have a WD
Green drive in a USB enclosure.  That disk has really quite poor
performance.  But certainly in this case it is the "green" drive.  It
actually works okay in the USB enclosure but the appearance is that it
is very slow.  It idles out and spins down and then takes a dozen
seconds to spin up.  It also has the classic green drive problem of
having the first partitions starts at LBA 63 which isn't aligned.

Basically I am thinking that your drives /might/ be green drives and
therefore might need special handling when setting up the partitions
in order to achieve any reasonable bandwidth.

> Have you considered going ESATA?  If you have free SATA ports on the
> motherboard, ESATA can be done with just a cable I believe, or ESATA cards
> are cheap and well supported under Linux -- definitely more "mature" than
> I'd expect USB 3.0 to be.   But I don't honestly know how well supported
> USB 3.0 is.

Let me give a +1 vote for eSATA.  Performance is full SATA speeds and
it works awesomely.  However I shopped around and my external eSATA
disk enclosure is just signal pass-through and so there is no delay
for external electronics.  It is no different from if it were mounted
internally.  But those are hard to find now.  I wish I had bought a
few spares now.

Bob