I'm experiencing very slow data transfer speeds over USB 2.0 on my nix box and was wondering how I can pin-point the cause of the problem. I've looked into iotop and top but the cpu and mem figures look normal (compared to guides I have checked). The box which is affected is Ubuntu 12.04 32bit Server running on an Asus EEE 701 2G model and I am transferring from the OS over USB 2.0 to an external HDD (which transfers at 30MB/s+ on Windows 7 on other machine). I get rsync write speeds of 1MB/s from OS to USB HDD which seems ridiculously slow. These speeds are consistent with other USB HDDs and sticks.