SLOW backing up to USB

russella wrote:
I really want to use NTFS for this, because it will be the only storage repository for my data while I do a factory init on my NV+, and if something (else) goes wrong, I want to be able to access the data easily from a PC. I know there are ways to mount an EXT3 volume from win, but I don't see that it's worth it.

I think it is worth it. If your files are all under 4GB in size per file FAT32 is an option.

russella wrote:
I understand you are implicating the format of the USB disk as the reason for the slow performance. How much faster would it be using EXT3?

See this post which has some rough estimates that chirpa came up with:

chirpa wrote:
The speeds are something close to this: NTFS = 2.5MB/s FAT32 = 5MB/s EXT3 = 10MB/s EXT2 = 14MB/s

russella wrote:
And why can a many-year-old laptop running WinXP do so much better? We're not talking about a minor speed problem here, this is severe.

Your ReadyNAS uses a slow CPU. USB backups are fairly CPU intensive. The newer x86 ReadyNAS handle NTFS backups a lot better. Remember NTFS is native to Windows whereas it isn't to Linux. It's much easier to handle filesystems that are native to the OS you are working with. The ReadyNAS RAIDiator OS is a customised form of Debian Linux.