480mbps USB, 100mbps network connection, USB shared drive. Difference?

[Jayce]

Just a curious question here... I have a system here that has an external hard drive plugged in 247. The external hard drive is shared out.

Seeing as though the user would see its most restrictive bottle neck at the network connection, which is 10/100, is it safe to say that the end user would not see a speed difference whether the external hard drive was plugged in via USB 2.0 (like it is) as opposed to having a 1TB SATA internal hard drive inside the system?

Just got to thinking about it and wanted to see what other users thought here.

 

[kmote]

May as well leave it where it is if it's only used by the network. 12.5MB/s (network) < 60MB/s (USB2) < ~90MB/s (HDD) < 300MB/s (SATA2).

 

[Jayce]

May as well leave it where it is if it's only used by the network. 12.5MB/s (network) < 60MB/s (USB2) < ~90MB/s (HDD) < 300MB/s (SATA2).

Yeah, I'm not planning on moving it. I was just curious if despite USB having a higher data transfer rate than a 100mbps line if the fact it's going network-USB-hdd instead of network-HDD if the addition of USB in the middle would cause some sort of additional bottleneck.

It was just one of those weird things that popped into my head and I figured I'd ask about. Thanks much!

 

[Nitestick]

Yeah, the bottleneck should definitely be the network unless you run into USB bandwidth issues either by using a hub or saturating the host (which should be pretty hard to do).