USB speeds under MacOS X on 1998-2003 Macs
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
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
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.