Raspberry Pi with slow external hard drive  January 1, 2013  On
a day like January 1st I mostly like relaxing in front of the TV
with some movies or series and I had been looking forward to it.
I got a powered USB hub for Christmas since our external hard
drive, a Verbatim N446, is USB powered and the Raspberry doesn’t
provide enough power for it. So we plugged in our new USB hub
and plugged the drive to that. Discovery and mounting went fine,
but when we started watching something it would take 3 seconds
before it would start to buffer - it actually used more time
buffered than playing.  A hdparm -tT /dev/sda showed some
disturbing news: /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 160 MB in 2.02
seconds = 79.35 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 14 MB in
33.51 seconds = 427.79 kB/sec  No way we could watch a movie
with 428 kB/sec. A little internet research showed that our
Raspberry Pi atleast treats it’s USB ports as a USB hub already
and when connecting a new one only the four first ports are
given decent speed. Checki