"Buffering..." from USB HDD, but not from netowrk streams

[namtih]

What Koenkk is saying is, that you can have a very powerful power adapter connected to the PI. But the USB ports of the PI will only use about 300mA - not more. And those 300mA are often not enough to power a USB drive.

But to test your USB drive and the general performance, you could try to execute this command via SSH:

Terminal

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/null bs=32M count=30 iflag=direct

This will create a 900MB test file on your disk.
Please replace "/dev/sdb1" with the indentifier of your USB drive. You should get it via a simple "df".
To give you any number to compare to, here is my result:

Terminal

root@xbian ~ # sudo df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 1953503968 1467509906 485994062 76% /mnt/hdd

root@xbian ~ # sudo dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/null bs=32M count=30 iflag=direct
30+0 records in
30+0 records out
1006632960 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 29.0751 s, 34.6 MB/s