USB Disk Speed

[Kent Borg]

So I had a very unhappy disk in my notebook.  It seemed to be a loose
connection, I won't burden you with the low-tech details of how I
seemed to have fixed it, but I think I am OK for the moment.

I had a recent backup on an external USB disk drive (yeah!), my
notebook has a builtin CD-ROM drive, and Knoppix works great.

Or does it?  It took forever to to restore.  I finally asked hdparm
what speed it was getting and Knoppix was getting 0.75MB/sec to my
external USB 2.0 disk.  Now I am back on Ubuntu.  I asked hdparm
again, and this time it is getting 27 MB/sec.  Any suggestions on why
the difference?  (And what live CD does this faster?  My Knoppix is a
bit old, maybe newer versions are faster.

-kb