>i use a 5400 hard disk on my laptop (thinkpad x30)
>the best speed i get from it is 12 mb/s at sustained
>rate, so if you get a speed between 10 and 15 mb/s from
>the usb2 i think that usb2 handles it pretty well :)

well.... 7200rpm drives are with everything else the same
just 33% faster than 5400rpm drives.

The drive in question can read between 22 and 50 MByte/s
from the disk depending on the cylinder. A raw read via USB2
yields only 17MByte/s, independent of the cylinder.

-- 
-- 
                                Michael van Elst
Internet: mlelstv@serpens.de
                                "A potential Snark may lurk in every tree."