USB speeds under MacOS X on 1998-2003 Macs

curufinwecurufinwe
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I have been pondering this one for a while before posting, but I can't find anything definitive in web searches. I have noticed that flash drives, printing and other USB use is especially slow on my iBook Dual USB (Jaguar).



When transfering files from my iBook to a PC, it takes 45 minutes to fill up a 64 MB USB 1.1 flash drive. That is less than 30KB/second.



When transfering the same files onto the drive with the PC (a two year old computer, not a new USB 2.0 PC) It takes around 3 minutes. Thats around 250KB/second.



Now I gather that there are three levels of USB with three theoretical peak transfer speeds:



1.0 > 1.5 Mb/s > 200KB/s "Regular USB"

1.1 > 12 Mb/s > 1.5MB/s "Full Speed USB"

2.0 > 480 Mb/s > 60MB/s "High Speed USB"



From the terrible speeds I am getting I am wondering if the iBook (G3 800 early 2003) shipped with 1.0 only despite the fact that 1.1 has been out for three years or so. I know that USB 2.0 is on Macs from the middle of 2003, and I don't need that, but I am tired of waiting for a half hour to pass some photos to a friend.



Does anyone else have an idea what is going on or have similar experiences / possible remedies to share? Can I upgrade drivers somewhere or something? I don't think OS9 is nearly this bad - how is Panther?



Any help would be appreciated



Curufinwe

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    maccrazymaccrazy Posts: 2,658member
    I think all Macs that came out in 2003 used the 12MB/sec USB, unless they were USB 2, i use a Zip Drive on a CRT iMac and it doesn't appear to be USB 1.0 because it seems reasonably fast, i bought it in 2002. Could it just be your iBook that's slow? I don;t know because my Zip Drive works faster on my PC, but not as much as to indicate 1.0 being used on my Mac. I hope this makes sense.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    curufinwecurufinwe Posts: 104member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by MacCrazy

    Could it just be your iBook that's slow?



    I know that USB taxes the CPU a lot (one of the reasons that Firewire is better) but my iBook is 800 MHz and these PCs are not 20 times faster as the USB speeds would indicate.



    Perhaps it is something to do with just my machine, but I was wondering if anyone else has observed the same type of thing.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    drboardrboar Posts: 477member
    With Flash drives they are really slow if you keep the FAT32 format, reformatted to HFS they copy way faster. I keep my pendrive 128 MB Acer in HFS+ and if I have to use a PC I referomat it to FAT32 for the occation and then back to HFS again when I am done. If I will have to jump a lot between PC and Mac I will get a second pendrive for just that
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