[lug] help on new disk. Speed and formatting issues

[Phil Rasch]

I just bought a new external disk, and I am running thru a PCMCIA USB2
connection on my laptop. 

The disk worked fine when I first installed it. It was preformatted
with a fat32 partition. I tested it with 

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

and hdparm reported that it was behaving reasonably 

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:  128MB in 0.9 seconds = 137.63 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.17 seconds = 15.35 MB/sec

The numbers werent great, but they were as fast as the internal drive
I have on the machine and good enough.

I decided I wanted a journalled file system on most of it, so I
repartitioned it (three partitions sda1, sda2, sda2) with parted, 
and formatted it with reiserfs(sda2 and sda2) and mke2fs (sda1). I am
not quite sure why I used an ext2 file system on sda1 but that is what
I chose.

Anyway, now hdparm reports pitiful transfer rates 
/dev/sda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:  128MB in 0.9 seconds = 137.63 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 69 seconds = 938 kB/sec

Can anybody tell me what I have screwed up?

Thanks

Phil