Thanks for all the feedback everyone. You all raised good points, some of them I agree with and some of them I do not, but I'll just leave it at that.
Alright, so I had a chance to test a few things out and there is nothing like a real number to tell the story, so here it goes.
1) Environment
I mentioned camera pics transfer because I'm talking about my Pentax K5-II DSLR. That simply accepts a storage card, which in my case is a Samsung Pro SDXC 32G card, that on my Android phone (Samsung S9) gets a 67M Read and 61M Write speeds. This card, using the very same USB stick but different hardware which runs a Win7 Pro install, shows a 13M Read and 7M Write speeds. The card is FAT32 formatted.
The card simply comes out of the DSLR's mount spot, I plug that into a reader stick, plug that puppy in and off I go. The card was previously configured to be LVM-aware, so it has it's own volume letter assigned.
The actual USB card reader specs are:
<<< Device Description >>>
Type : 01
USB Rev : 200
Class : Reserved (0)
Subclass : Reserved (0)
Protocol : Reserved (0)
Device Information is defined at interface Level
Max. packetsize : 40
Vendor ID : 0BDA
Product ID : 0119
Device Release# : 1985
Strings:
Manufacturer Name : Generic
Product Name : USB2.0-CRW
Serial number : 20090815198100000
Number of Configurations : 1
Configuration 0 :
Lenght : 32
Name : CARD READER
Value : 1
Attributes : 0x80
Power : 500 mA
Interfaces : 1
Interface 0
Alt Setting : 0
Name : <NONE>
Class : Storage Device
SubClass : SCSI transparent command set
Protocol : Bulk-Only Transport
Endpoints : 2
Endpoint 0:
Address : 01
Attributes : 02
Packetsize : 0200
Interval : 0
Endpoint 1:
Address : 82
Attributes : 02
Packetsize : 0200
Interval : 0
This is all plugged into my USB 2.0 port driven by the AOS USBEHCD 12.07 drivers.
2) Results
These are obtained by mounting the card and using LCMD filemanager to copy 12 JPG files off of the card onto a RAMDISK, files are approx 8-10M each in size.
OK, two stages here:
2a) 5.0.3.r171 AOS FAT32 install
- default settings, cache=2048, etc. shows a steady throughput of about 1M
- disabling cache and setting to 0 (zero) drops that throughput down to 250k
2b) 0.10.r383 NetLabs FAT32 install
- default settings, cache=2048, etc. shows a steady throughput of about 3M
- disabling cache and setting to 0 (zero) bumps that throughput up by about 500k to 3.5M
- what is interesting here is that with the cache disabled I am getting sporadic spikes of up to 6-7M, which drop off to about 2M and speed up again
OK, there it is.
Given these results I'm sticking with the Netlabs release, I simply cannot afford to waste time waiting for tens and occasionally hundreds of images to get moved off of my card. 3x the speed difference is just far too large of a gap.
I will say this (being part of the testing group and regularly testing the USB stuff and only intermittently the FAT32 stuff): Gregg put a LOT of effort into making the AOS FAT32 stuff work, so I do not want to take anything away from that and the stability improvements that has brought.
What I described above is a very limitted use-case, that being a fairly small storage card, this certainly pales in comparison to someone who may want to run a multi-Gig drive - I'm thinking the readily available mobile USB drives, and in that situation the AOS may in fact provide the better results. Heck, for all I know, this all may be a moot point when hooking up to a USB3 anyways...I did not test as I have no USB3 interface storage devices here.
I have not tested a from-scratch 'partition/LVM-mark/format/etc.' process either, so this test only covers the accessibility of the device and the throughput rates I'm seeing.
EDIT
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Added the FAT32 card formatting reference and correct Netlabs r383 driver info.