USB harddisk terribly slow

[DanTheBanjoman]

We have a Western Digital Mybook World here (a Linux based NAS) which needs to be backed up now and then. The simplest way seemed to be hooking a USB disk of equal size to it and doing a diskcopy now and then.
The theory seemed ok, practically it seems to work as well, with a huge downside: transfer rates are under 2MB/s.
This is both using dd (preferred method)and cp, according to lsusb the USB bus is running at hispeed. It seems unrelated to the way I mount it (sync/async, whatever), as I tried dd when the drive wasn't mounted and the issue was still there.

I also attempted to just use cp to a NTFS drive, installed ntfs-3g for this, ntfs-3g won't work at all though, and the default support is read-only.

[W1zzard]

try to copy /dev/zero to a file on the usb stick, see if that is faster. maybe the reading speed is your limitation

[DanTheBanjoman]

try to copy /dev/zero to a file on the usb stick, see if that is faster. maybe the reading speed is your limitation

Network transfers are a lot faster. A gigabit device limited to 2MB/s would be rather silly as well. Not that it's that fast either, but still.

[xfire]

you should also install ntfs-3g config which gives you a GUI to mount drives.