I'm out of SATA ports and bays on my OMV box so I decided until I had more time to relocate files and replace with larger drives, I would just attach a Seagate USB3 external drive. Was able to both initialize the drive as ext4 and mount it no problem.
It's plugged into a USB3 port on my tower.
Here's the issue - Performance is just terrible when copying files to or from the device. Gets as fast as 4 MB/s and then stalls all the way down to 200 KB/s before gradually getting up to 4 MB again, then droping back down, etc. Most of the time it's around 500 KB/s.
So slow that it seems to bog down the entire system as far as response time, not just the drives involved in the copy. I've tried it both over SMB as well as NFS and directly over SSH. It just seems that the speeds writing to this 5TB USB Seagate external are EXTREMELY slow.
I seem to recall having a similar issue prior to this when attempting to attach an external drive and then just gutting the case and putting the drive on SATA. Am I doing something wrong or is there anything I can try? Is there a way to determine if the ports I am connecting to on the case are truly USB3 and not just USB2 (and would USB2 explain the slowness)? They are labeled as 3.0 ports but perhaps the case was assembled wrong and they're connecting over to USB2 busses on the mobo?
Any thoughts most appreciated.