Mailing List Archive: Iomega Rev & USB 2

Iomega Rev & USB 2

Sep 23, 2004, 1:22 PM

Post #1 of 11 (4118 views)

Hi -

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with an Iomeg Rev drive.

Apparently everything works fine. I can mount, read and write to the drive. The problem is when I write a large volume of data to the drive, the drive slows to a crawl (and so does the computer for that matter, but CPU usage is more or less 0). The system load jumps and it takes several hours before the data is completely written to the drive and I can unmount it. It might be important to note that the backup application or whatever I'm using finishes a long time before the buffer is written to disk. I probably should be sending iostat output, but I needed to work on my computer today and it was last night that I last encountered this issue. This problem really makes the Rev drive unusable.

So, I'm not sure that this is an Rev issue or USB 2 issue, but I've only encountered this problem Rev drive.

Stuart
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Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

jhuebel at gentoo

Sep 23, 2004, 1:56 PM

Post #2 of 11 (4059 views)

Permalink

On Thursday 23 September 2004 3:22 pm, Stuart Haas wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone has any experience with an Iomeg Rev drive.
>
> Apparently everything works fine. I can mount, read and write to the
> drive. The problem is when I write a large volume of data to the drive,
> the drive slows to a crawl (and so does the computer for that matter, but
> CPU usage is more or less 0). The system load jumps and it takes several
> hours before the data is completely written to the drive and I can unmount
> it. It might be important to note that the backup application or whatever
> I'm using finishes a long time before the buffer is written to disk. I
> probably should be sending iostat output, but I needed to work on my
> computer today and it was last night that I last encountered this issue.
> This problem really makes the Rev drive unusable.
>
> So, I'm not sure that this is an Rev issue or USB 2 issue, but I've only
> encountered this problem Rev drive.

I find it unlikely that it's a USB2 issue, unless it's a problem with USB
that's just recently been introduced in a new kernel. What kernel are you
running?

I use a USB2 enclosure for my 80GB IDE hard drive and I experience no
slowdowns. I'm typically copying video captures or large MP3 collections
back and forth between that drive and my internal SATA drive.

--
Jason Huebel
Gentoo/amd64 Strategic Lead
Gentoo Developer Relations/Recruiter

GPG Public Key:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x9BA9E230

"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."
Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)

Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

stuart at stuarthaas

Sep 23, 2004, 1:59 PM

Post #3 of 11 (4065 views)

Permalink

2.6.8-gentoo-r4

I've had this issue from about 2.6.5 when I bought the drive, just never really got around to really troubleshooting this issue.

Jason Huebel wrote:

On Thursday 23 September 2004 3:22 pm, Stuart Haas wrote:
I was wondering if anyone has any experience with an Iomeg Rev drive. Apparently everything works fine. I can mount, read and write to the drive. The problem is when I write a large volume of data to the drive, the drive slows to a crawl (and so does the computer for that matter, but CPU usage is more or less 0). The system load jumps and it takes several hours before the data is completely written to the drive and I can unmount it. It might be important to note that the backup application or whatever I'm using finishes a long time before the buffer is written to disk. I probably should be sending iostat output, but I needed to work on my computer today and it was last night that I last encountered this issue. This problem really makes the Rev drive unusable. So, I'm not sure that this is an Rev issue or USB 2 issue, but I've only encountered this problem Rev drive.
I find it unlikely that it's a USB2 issue, unless it's a problem with USB that's just recently been introduced in a new kernel. What kernel are you running? I use a USB2 enclosure for my 80GB IDE hard drive and I experience no slowdowns. I'm typically copying video captures or large MP3 collections back and forth between that drive and my internal SATA drive.

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Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

jhuebel at gentoo

Sep 23, 2004, 2:08 PM

Post #4 of 11 (4062 views)

Permalink

On Thursday 23 September 2004 3:59 pm, Stuart Haas wrote:
> 2.6.8-gentoo-r4
>
> I've had this issue from about 2.6.5 when I bought the drive, just never
> really got around to really troubleshooting this issue.

Hmmm... I would point the finger (guess which one?) at the drive, then. If
you've always had trouble with it... Have you tried it on another machine or
with a different OS to verify that it isn't just your machine?

P.S. HTML Email is evil... ;-)

--
Jason Huebel
Gentoo/amd64 Strategic Lead
Gentoo Developer Relations/Recruiter

GPG Public Key:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x9BA9E230

"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."
Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)

Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

stuart at stuarthaas

Sep 23, 2004, 2:15 PM

Post #5 of 11 (4061 views)

Permalink

I just wasn't sure if there were any USB 2 issues.

The drive only works on USB 2 and I don't have a windows machine with
USB 2 and windows thorough vmware doesn't work so well when you're
trying to debug the host.

P.S. I exocised my email.

Jason Huebel wrote:

>On Thursday 23 September 2004 3:59 pm, Stuart Haas wrote:
>
>
>> 2.6.8-gentoo-r4
>>
>> I've had this issue from about 2.6.5 when I bought the drive, just never
>>really got around to really troubleshooting this issue.
>>
>>
>
>Hmmm... I would point the finger (guess which one?) at the drive, then. If
>you've always had trouble with it... Have you tried it on another machine or
>with a different OS to verify that it isn't just your machine?
>
>P.S. HTML Email is evil... ;-)
>
>
>

--
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

luke-jr at utopios

Sep 23, 2004, 4:04 PM

Post #6 of 11 (4060 views)

Permalink

On Thursday 23 September 2004 8:56 pm, Jason Huebel wrote:
> I use a USB2 enclosure for my 80GB IDE hard drive and I experience no
> slowdowns. I'm typically copying video captures or large MP3 collections
> back and forth between that drive and my internal SATA drive.
How do you get around the slowdown caused by the lack of DMA?
--
Luke-Jr
Developer, Utopios
http://utopios.org/

--
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

jhuebel at gentoo

Sep 23, 2004, 6:43 PM

Post #7 of 11 (4060 views)

Permalink

On Thursday 23 September 2004 6:04 pm, Luke-Jr wrote:
> On Thursday 23 September 2004 8:56 pm, Jason Huebel wrote:
> > I use a USB2 enclosure for my 80GB IDE hard drive and I experience no
> > slowdowns. I'm typically copying video captures or large MP3 collections
> > back and forth between that drive and my internal SATA drive.
>
> How do you get around the slowdown caused by the lack of DMA?

Well, I've never tested the transfer speeds, to be honest. But I can say that
the USB2 enclosure/IDE hard drive combination is fairly speedy. At least,
it's speedy enough for the purposes I use it for (MP3 mega-collection).

I'll run some benchmarks and see what it shows...

--
Jason Huebel
Gentoo/amd64 Strategic Lead
Gentoo Developer Relations/Recruiter

GPG Public Key:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x9BA9E230

"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."
Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)

Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

stuart at stuarthaas

Sep 23, 2004, 6:57 PM

Post #8 of 11 (4059 views)

Permalink

Thanks

Jason Huebel wrote:

>On Thursday 23 September 2004 6:04 pm, Luke-Jr wrote:
>
>
>>On Thursday 23 September 2004 8:56 pm, Jason Huebel wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I use a USB2 enclosure for my 80GB IDE hard drive and I experience no
>>>slowdowns. I'm typically copying video captures or large MP3 collections
>>>back and forth between that drive and my internal SATA drive.
>>>
>>>
>>How do you get around the slowdown caused by the lack of DMA?
>>
>>
>
>Well, I've never tested the transfer speeds, to be honest. But I can say that
>the USB2 enclosure/IDE hard drive combination is fairly speedy. At least,
>it's speedy enough for the purposes I use it for (MP3 mega-collection).
>
>I'll run some benchmarks and see what it shows...
>
>
>

--
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

luke-jr at utopios

Sep 23, 2004, 7:22 PM

Post #9 of 11 (4050 views)

Permalink

On Friday 24 September 2004 1:43 am, Jason Huebel wrote:
> On Thursday 23 September 2004 6:04 pm, Luke-Jr wrote:
> > On Thursday 23 September 2004 8:56 pm, Jason Huebel wrote:
> > > I use a USB2 enclosure for my 80GB IDE hard drive and I experience no
> > > slowdowns. I'm typically copying video captures or large MP3
> > > collections back and forth between that drive and my internal SATA
> > > drive.
> >
> > How do you get around the slowdown caused by the lack of DMA?
>
> Well, I've never tested the transfer speeds, to be honest. But I can say
> that the USB2 enclosure/IDE hard drive combination is fairly speedy. At
> least, it's speedy enough for the purposes I use it for (MP3
> mega-collection).
>
> I'll run some benchmarks and see what it shows...
You probably won't find anything. Try benchmarking CPU usage at the same time,
and that's when it would be an issue.
--
Luke-Jr
Developer, Utopios
http://utopios.org/

--
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

llu at vicaya

Sep 23, 2004, 9:56 PM

Post #10 of 11 (4058 views)

Permalink

Well, one data point using a USB 2.0 enclosure with a 250GB ATA100,
formatted with XFS:

Backing up a 30GB NTFS partition with 8.5GB data (with quite a few
compressed files) using partimage with default gzip compression
resulting an 6.5GB image takes 20 mins, which is about 5.5MB/s.

The machine is an emachine m6809 laptop (Athlon 64 3200, dual boot
xp/gentoo 2.6.8-r4). The enclosure is:
http://www.cooldrives.com/usb20fidkree.html

__Luke

Stuart Haas wrote:

> Thanks
>
> Jason Huebel wrote:
>
>> On Thursday 23 September 2004 6:04 pm, Luke-Jr wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Thursday 23 September 2004 8:56 pm, Jason Huebel wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> I use a USB2 enclosure for my 80GB IDE hard drive and I experience no
>>>> slowdowns. I'm typically copying video captures or large MP3
>>>> collections
>>>> back and forth between that drive and my internal SATA drive.
>>>>
>>>
>>> How do you get around the slowdown caused by the lack of DMA?
>>>
>>
>>
>> Well, I've never tested the transfer speeds, to be honest. But I can
>> say that the USB2 enclosure/IDE hard drive combination is fairly
>> speedy. At least, it's speedy enough for the purposes I use it for
>> (MP3 mega-collection).
>>
>> I'll run some benchmarks and see what it shows...
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
>

--
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: Iomega Rev & USB 2 [ In reply to ]

pauldv at gentoo

Sep 24, 2004, 1:02 AM

Post #11 of 11 (4062 views)

Permalink

On Thursday 23 September 2004 23:15, Stuart Haas wrote:
> I just wasn't sure if there were any USB 2 issues.
>
> The drive only works on USB 2 and I don't have a windows machine with
> USB 2 and windows thorough vmware doesn't work so well when you're
> trying to debug the host.
>
> P.S. I exocised my email.

Ps. top posting is evil too.

Paul

--
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net