Write performance on EXT3/EXT4 is REALLY SLOW!

What write speeds are you getting?

How are you writing to the USB disk? From your PC?

I am doing an RSYNC backup on the NAS and seeing about 4MB/sec. Should be getting about 10x that. So disk-to-disk on the NAS.

ESATA not USB.

I was running NTFS for a while (before frontpanel formatting was available) and was getting about 40MB/sec.

'm guessing it is combo of journaling, barrier=1 and data=ordered. I think some of this can be tweaked with tunefs but other parts are managed by setup_usb_storage (from what I can tell)

Any advice?

Rsync is CPU intensive.

The use of Rsync explains the performance. Rsync is great for incremental backups (especially over the internet) as it only has to copy the changes to files across.

I think it is more than that, like I said I was getting around 40MB/sec when I was running the same backup command to the same drive formatted with NTFS

... and I am seeing worse performance when I am using tar to copy the files.

Out of curiosity what's the commands to format as either NTFS or EXT4 from the command-line? I am getting somewhat flaky results using the frontend to format. Want to try going back to NTFS just to confirm above.

There are commands such as mkfs.ntfs, mkfs.ext4 etc.

OK, thanks. I tried formatting to NTFS in frontpanel, frontpanel shows it is formatted NTFS, but device isn't mounted (/media is empty). I tried rebooting but it still didn't mount (and still shows as formatted NTFS)

What would the command look like to format exactly? And once formatted how would it get mounted? Or would I just restart after formatting and let the system recognize it?

And I do see "External storage device is connected but the filesystem is not recognized" as most recent entry in log.

But like I said, it shows as NTFS in the front panel.

root@Storage:~# sgdisk -p /dev/sdg
Disk /dev/sdg: 5860533168 sectors, 2.7 TiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 0402E486-EC37-4D7F-B4C6-7A5BEAF28BE6
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 5860533134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2925 sectors (1.4 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048      5860532223   2.7 TiB     0700  Basic data partition

Not sure what options we use, but you can do

# mkfs.ntfs --help

to see options you can use