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USB disk speed

Started by hawklord, 2011.02.27, 16:37:08

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hawklord

I am currently copying files to an external USB disk formatted as FAT32, but copying is extremely slow. Copying on the same system booted with Windows works fine.
What USB version is supported by ecs?
Are there any settings to speed up file transfer?

abwillis

Reads from the USB drive can be increased by patching the driver.  The information is available at:
http://en.ecomstation.ru/projects/usbtools/?action=faq-usb
There is also some information there about speeding up writes but it seems to be relevant if you are writing a program that will be writing to USB. 
Write speeds will be affected by the version of FAT32 driver you are using.  Also, for some of the fat32 drivers it increased performance to disable write cache (I do not recall if that was true for the latest version or not).
Andy

ivan

I think you might be asking the wrong question.  If you are copying the files as a backup then you should consider formatting the drive as HPFS or JFS, then the speed of transfer will be better and there will be less likelihood of the process failing part way through.

If you are just doing it to transfer files to another computer (non OS/2) then you are stuck with FAT32 and its inherent slowness.  You might be able to improve the speed a little as per Andy's advice.

I have a USB drive with two partitions - one JFS, the other FAT32 and I see a difference in copy speed between them with the same file and same usb socket - the FAT32 is much the slower.

ivan

Pete

Hi hawklord

FAT32 is a Windows disk format so it should work OK with Windows.

Sadly, on OS/2 based systems it is sllooowwww. So slow that it is not worth bothering with unless you really need to share data with a Windows system and have no other way of performing that sharing. If you do not need to use this drive with Windows then format it JFS and I think you will find the speed is adequate  :-)

eCS(OS/2) supports USB1 and USB2 - hopefully USB3 support will arrive sometime...

Regarding speed: You can either patch the usb2 driver as suggested in another post or try the later patched drivers http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/system/drivers/misc/usbxhcd7.zip

Regards

Pete


Andi

My speed tests with patched USB driver -

ext. HD FAT32:
write 4,0MByte/s (with or without FAT32 cache similar)
read 9,0MByte/s

ext. HD JFS:
write 20,6MByte/s
read 23MByte/s

same HD write FAT32 with W2k ~26,7MByte/s

So write speed is about 5 times higher with JFS than FAT32. And Win can write even faster to the USB disk than eCS. AFAIR I tested with only a few big files. So speed difference maybe even worse when copying a lot of small files.

StefanZ

Quote from: Andi on 2011.02.28, 10:28:22
My speed tests with patched USB driver -

ext. HD FAT32:
write 4,0MByte/s (with or without FAT32 cache similar)
read 9,0MByte/s

ext. HD JFS:
write 20,6MByte/s
read 23MByte/s

same HD write FAT32 with W2k ~26,7MByte/s

So write speed is about 5 times higher with JFS than FAT32. And Win can write even faster to the USB disk than eCS. AFAIR I tested with only a few big files. So speed difference maybe even worse when copying a lot of small files.


Just a quick question: How did you measure the JFS and FAT32 transfer speed in eCS?
Thx.

hawklord

Thanks for your replies.
Yes, the purpose is to share and backup some data between OS/2 and Windows computers. Writing from Windows is about hundred (100) times faster  >:(
I use FAT32.IFS that came with ecs 2.0 RC 6a. Also USBXHCD7. USBDock says that the drive is USB 2.0. Have not tried the driver patching yet. And I did have a JFS volume before, but removed it due to lack of space.
Here is the initialisation line:
IFS=H:\ECS\BOOT\FAT32.IFS /CACHE:2048 /H /Q

abwillis

If you are using usbxhcd7.zip then you do not need to patch it, but rather there is a config.sys parameter.

DougB

QuoteWindows is about hundred (100) times faster

That sounds like you don't have the ECHI driver installed for all of the EHCI adapters, and it is using the USB 1.1 adapter to do the work. I suggest getting:
http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/system/USBcfgb071-eCS-only.wpi
and see what it has to say. Specifically compare the number of EHCI adapters to the number of loaded EHCI drivers.

One other thing, is to REM the
CALL=C:\ECS\BIN\CACHEF32.EXE /S /F
line in CONFIG.SYS. The FAT32 driver works much more reliably (especially with removable media), and it is FASTER (but not by much) without using the cache.

rudi

Quote from: DougB on 2011.02.28, 20:39:30
One other thing, is to REM the
CALL=C:\ECS\BIN\CACHEF32.EXE /S /F

It's preferrable to replace "/F" with "/N" instead of remming out the line completly.
Otherwise the codepage translation table will not be initialized correctly and you
get problems with file names containing NLS specific characters on media shared
with non-OS/2 systems.

Andi

Quote from: StefanZ on 2011.02.28, 16:49:12
Just a quick question: How did you measure the JFS and FAT32 transfer speed in eCS?
Thx.
LarsenCommander has a nice copy dialog with such statistic infos.

hawklord

Thank you all for the advice. I'll try them out next time I'll do some copying.

(Perhaps it would be a better idea to use an online backup service these days, we'll see...)