Improved performance with USB 2.0
 

I've been looking for how to improve the performance of my computer and I have an idea. ATA133 hard drives transfer at 133 megabytes per second and the new SATA only move it up to 150 megabytes per second. that doesn't look impressive and i've heard that it really isn't. but USB 2.0 is capable of transfering at 480Mbps. I've tested with a small USB flash drive and on linux, or at least mine, it is set to wait until unmounting the hard drive before writing anything to it. If I can change that setting to write to the hard drive as soon as it is requested is there any reason I can't get a large USB 2.0 hard drive (like 80GB) and have a higher transfer rate than a normal hard drive. I think I would still have to have an ATA hard drive for the MBR and the /boot partition, but I should be able to put my / on USB.

p.s. I realize not all USB 2.0 hard drives will transfer at full speed, I did find one that says it transfers at 480Mbps at TigerDirect

I doubt that will work. The tiger add is very deceptive IMHO and is merely quoting the theoretical max trasfer rate of usb2.0. You won't get that just like you won't get the max transfer rate for ultra ide or sata except for possible short bursts. Hdparm for my sata is in the 60MB/sec range and for my usb2.0 hard drive it's in the 30MB/sec range.

USB bandwidth is about 60 megabytes per second. If you bring in filesystem and controller in the equation the input and output transfer starts to go down a lot. USB has very huge headroom so, going at 60 megabytes per second will not happen. Also you will then have to worry about how fast can PCI transfer. On paper the PCI bus can transfer about 133 megabyte per second, but in real world environments I only see it going about 2/3 to 3/4 of the transfer.