On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 05:32:14PM +0000, Martijn van Buul wrote:
> It occurred to me that joel@carnat.net wrote in gmane.os.netbsd.current:
> > Anyone ever tried that ?
> > Anyone knows if the USB driver on the motherboard (or on the disk rack)
> > makes it better depending on the brand/version ?
> 
> It all depends on what kind of data you want to export, and on what kind
> of disk you're doing that. USB2 cannot match the speed of modern (s)ata
> disks, but the real issue is "will this make a real difference".
> 
> I've been using a fairly modern ATA disk in a USB2 enclosure on an 
> Athlon64 over nfs (heh) and it actually outperformed the aging disk
> I had in the same machine on a 'regular' ata channel. It was more than
> fast enough for my purposes - mainly media shares and assorted stuff
> like my (pkg)src repositories. In fact, I moved most of my media files
> to an USB2 disk being served by my Asus router[1], which really isn't fast
> enough to saturate the USB2 bus - but for mp3s, the +/- 3 MB/s it *does*
> pump out is good enough for me, and at a considerably lower power bill.
> 
> [1] And yes, I want to have a NetBSD port on that one. (Open|Free)WRT
>     stinks.

Martin,

Certainly a lot of people would appreciate NetBSD on 32-bit Broadcom
MIPS chips.

One of my Google SoC students, Ada Lim, began a port to the Asus WL-500G
router, see <http://svn.cuwireless.net/svn/cuw/trunk/src/bcmmips/>.
The port remains incomplete, but it's a start!  I don't know if Ada
intends to carry on with the port.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933