Very slow USB transfer

Beju · Apprentice Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 171

Transfer is extremely slow on my new USB key (8KB/s). What can be the cause of this? I've got this problem on my 2 computers, I think I've misconfigured something, because it can do ~3MB/s on my friend's machine.

fstab:

sonicbhoc · Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 8:10 pm Post subject:

Did you have an fstab line for it in your friend's computer? I don't have fstab entries for CD/DVDRW drives or any removable storage, as hal, dbus and your desktop environment should do the trick of configuring it for you.

Also, make double sure that your kernel configurations for USB is proper and that you have the proper SCSI support options (SCSI disk if I remember correctly).
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Beju · Apprentice Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 171

I think the configuration is ok, I've compared it to gentoo usb guide, one of my machines have these options in modules and the second has them built into the kernel. My friend's fstab line is almost exactly the same as mine:), the only difference is that he's got 'gid=plugdev' instead of my gid. Removing the configuration from fstab gives me this stupid async writing :/

Beju · Apprentice Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 171

Hmm I have some more questions: the drive I bought was initially not formatted and had no partitions created; so is it wise to format or create any other filesystems on it?

qwert667 · n00b Joined: 26 Jun 2006 Posts: 6

http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/13/144

Mark Clegg · Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 10:59 am Post subject:

I'd go along with quert667's comment, and remove the sync option from the fstab line.

Beju · Apprentice Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 171

I understand, but it doesn't speed up the transfer.

Lupin_the_3rd · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2005 Posts: 168

Add 'noatime' to your fstab entry for the usb key, it will speed up access to it a bit by not recording the last access time on each file in the filesystem.

Based on the speeds your reporting, it sounds like maybe you're plugging your key into a USB 1.1 port? Your friend has a USB 2.0 port. There is a *big* difference in bandwidth between the two types of USB ports.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB_signaling
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Beju · Apprentice Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 171

No, it's 2.0 port (look at my first post). Now something has changed and the drive appears to be faster; the worst thing is that I don't even know how to mesure it's speed

I've copied a 749MB file and it took 578 sec, so it's ~1.30MB/s, which still is too slow for an USB 2.0 key.

Lupin_the_3rd · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2005 Posts: 168

I wish someone would make a firewire thumb drive. They're big enough these days (multi-GB) that being able to count on an isochronous transfer would be nice.
_________________
Compaq XP1000 Alpha EV67 667Mhz w/ 2GB ECC
32bit PCI: ATI Radeon 9100 (DRI works!)
32bit PCI: Generic Firewire 400 card
64bit PCI: BCM5703 Gig-E (Compaq NC7771)
64bit PCI: Sil3124 SATA w/ mdadm RAID1 (pair of WD VelociRaptors)

Beju · Apprentice Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 171

Firewire is still not popular enough, I think. Besides, I doubt there would be a significant increase of performance. So why bother?