mtweidmann Posted February 16, 2004 Report Share Posted February 16, 2004 My motherboard has got USB 2.0 support (so the manual tells me), but I've never had any USB 2 devices to plug it into. Last Saturday I wanted to get some large files (4GBish) and luckily he has a USB 2 hard drive, so we used that to transfere them. The HD was detected immediately, mounted and worked well. BUT it was really slow, no where near the speed I'd expect from USB 2. Went and looked at the Mandrake website and it does say USB 2 is supported so I had a play around in MDK Control Centre but no joy. Martin Spec: AMD Athlon64 3200 512MB RAM MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R ATI Radeon 9200 MDK 9.2 64Bit Version Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 It may be the hard drive that is slow. Most portable USB2 HD uses a 2.5 inch 4200 RPM hard drive. As you can see.. the speed is almost half of a typical 7200 RPM IDE Harddrive used today. You can try testing it in windows instead, if the copy speed is faster then there may be a missing driver or something. Anyway, just a little bit of food for thought. When I use PCLinuxOS, there is a module named ehci-hcd. I am not sure what it does but harddrake uses it for PCI to USB Enhanced Host Controller. Mandrake 9.2 doesn't use that module at all. Maybe that is the USB 2.0 driver. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 EHCI is the controler for USB2.0. UHCI is the USB1.x controller for intel and via motherboard chipsets. OHCI is the USB1.x controller used by most add-on cards and m/b chipsets other than intel or via. For proper USB2.0 functionality you need both the EHCI driver and either UHCI or OHCI. Here's the hdparm transfer rates I get on my USB2.0 external hard drive: # hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 1500 MB in 2.00 seconds = 750.00 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 70 MB in 3.05 seconds = 22.95 MB/sec which isn't too bad. It does seem to slow down on large file transfers in both windows and linux. I assume that this is either a usb or hard drive limitation of some sort. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bam Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 type in "modprobe ehci-hcd" at the cli. You also might have to unload ohci first by typing: "modprobe -r usb-ohci". I have USB 1 built-in & a PCI USB 2.0 card, so I left ohci loaded on my system. This should enable your USB 2.0 support. To have it automatically start at bootup add "ehci-hcd" to /etc/modules Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scoopy Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 I read this in the interest of increasing my USB 2 speeds also. I am getting half of what pmpatrick is getting. Bam --- did you mean /etc/modules.conf or just /etc/modules ??? I have this line in my modules.conf already: probeall usb-interface usb-uhci usb-ohci ehci-hcd Which I imagine is correct since I can rw to the drive... I just would like it to be quicker too. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bam Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 (edited) I meant etc/modules. Add it to etc/modules as this will load it at boot. This keeps you from having to load it manually by typing "modprobe ehci-hcd" each time you re-boot. If you type in the modpreobe ehci-hcd command (su'd to root) you should see a speed increase you are looking for right off the bat. This way you can test if you want it started at boot. This is how I did it when I installed a USB 2.0 card in my box to speed up my ext USB HD. I had a huge speed increase after loading the ehci-hcd module. Was running MDK 9.2 at the time. I do have the same slowdown pmpatrick mentioned when transferring large files. It stalls then "plays catch up". I think this is normal for external USB drives. Edited February 17, 2004 by Bam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 Now for the solution :P don't use the automatic mdk stuff on usb2. Read my review on my website, I also put in a bugreport; take out the /etc/fstab line for supermount, and make/add your own command to mount (as user) the partition, make buttons on your desktop/taskbar to mount/unmount if you like. Using that, you will find that usb2 is really really fast. With normal conditions, all you get is something very similar to usb1.1 speeds (12mbit/s)... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 (edited) Good point aRTee. I disable supermount on all usb storage devices and create an entry in fstab and a mounting icon as you suggested. That may explain my faster transfer rates. Here's my fstab entry for my external hard drive: /dev/sda5 /mnt/rem vfat user,exec,noauto,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,quiet,umask=0 0 0 The "noauto" option is important if you don't have the drive permanently connected. If you don't have it, the system will hang on boot if the device is not connected at boot time. Edited February 17, 2004 by pmpatrick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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