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Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 3:01 am
by virtualmix
Hello all,
I takes 6 minutes to transfer 1Go of data from my computer to a USB stick (same with USB hard drive).
I am using USB 2.0 hardware and a computer with plenty of resources.
How can I improve the transfer rate?
Is anyone else concerned?
Any suggestion welcome
Re: Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 3:18 am
by richyrich
Is the pen drive formatted as fat32 ?
Re: Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 4:40 am
by virtualmix
Yes it is.
Re: Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 6:40 am
by rekik
Have you checked if usb 2.0 is enabled in BIOS
Re: Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 7:48 am
by virtualmix
I can't find any USB 2.0 setting in bios but there's other options:
EDIT: I have just disabled USB legacy function and USB storage legacy to perform a test. Unfortunately it didn't change anything and the transfer remain very slow.
Re: Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 8:57 am
by richyrich
I've been trying to find the source . . but no luck yet.
It went something like; Read rates can be up to ten times faster than Write rates on usb drives. And there is an additional bunch of file/format conversion happening when writing to fat32. Better to use ntfs was the recommendation . . . hopefully I'll find the sources.
Re: Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 9:23 am
by virtualmix
Thanks Richyrich,
Does anyone else experience slow USB transfer?
Re: Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 9:31 am
by Quantumboredom
I'd like to note that the speeds you are seeing are not abnormal for cheap USB flash drives. If 1 GiB takes 6 minutes, that translates to 3.0 MB/s, which is about what cheap flash drives are specified for. It is strange if you're seeing a similarly low speed for a hard drive though.
And since 3 MB/s is twice the USB 1.1 rate, it does seem like you are using USB 2.0. I'm afraid I don't have any suggestions for you though. Perhaps you could try a different file system (NTFS or ext2/3/4).
Re: Very slow USB transfer
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 11:49 am
by virtualmix
I did some more test with my hard drive and it seems a lot faster than it used to be.
It took me only 30 sec to transfer almost 1Go (26MB/sec) on my fat32 partition.
This may be due to my new bios setting (legacy option disabled) I will perform some more test and let you know.
I thought a USB stick and a USB hard drive would have the same transfer rate, but I was wrong.
My USB stick is definitly the cheapest one on the market therefore it will never achieve fast transfer. Thanks to Quantumboredom for pointing this out.
I guess everything is fine now, thank you all for your help
