I have a printer, a scanner, a digital camera dock and a SM card reader - all connected to the USB 1.1 port.
Im not too concerned about the printer, its the painfully slow scanning speeds and the five minutes it takes to download the 128 M of images from the camera or the card reader.
Is the current USB 1.1 limiting the performance of the devices?
Would spending about $60 dollars to get a USB 2.0 card and a few cables be worth the speed difference?
I suspect there will be some improvement, but probably not the 40x that is advertised.
As LordVor indicated all the USB components needs to be USB 2.0 compatible to take full advantage of USB 2.0 speed increases. With respect to the SM card bear in mind that flash cards of various types have built in data speed transfer limitations depending on their engineering and the faster ones are usually more expensive so even if you have a 2.0 USB reader and 2.0 compatible PC unless the card was one of the faster data transfer types you may not see any speed increase.
Ahaa, so I need to check to see if any of the equipment is USB 2.0 compatible. Didn`t think of that. Does make sense though…
Now, would any certain device have built in transfer speed limitations, per say, or is it mostly governed by the speed at which the PC can accept the data?
Each device runs has it’s own maximum transfer rate. For some devices, this rate exceeds USB 1.1 capabilities but does not reach USB 2.0 maximums. For some, USB 2.0 is still limiting. For some, USB 1.1 is plenty fast.
To go further than that, you’d have to do in-depth research into a particular make and model to judge what the actual speed gain would be. For instance, I know for a fact that my scanner says USB 2.0 on it, which means that it follows the 2.0 version of the USB protocal, but it doesn’t transfer data any faster when plugged into a 2.0 USB port than it does when plugged in to a 1.1 USB port.
There’s some real deception now with USB 1.1 versus 2.0 They renamed 1.1 to 2, and left 2 as 2. If I had more time I’d find a link that explains it, but do a search on slashdot.org to find out what amazing bullshit they are trying to pull.
Regarding the scanner, does it pause while scanning without moving the head? Like brrrrr, pause, brrrrr, pause, brrrr? If so, then the pauses are probably while it’s waiting for the data built up in the buffer to transfer. If it was USB 2.0, it would probably be faster.
More directly, I just got a USB 2.0 card at Amazon for $18, and it works fine. Made my scanner faster.
I saw that on slash dot and my take on it was: Nobody was saying USB 1.1 ran as fast as USB 2.0. Somebody whined that they were confused and said some body was pulling a fast one. It was just slash dot FUD.
You know, I really doubt that USB is your problem… I’d say it has more to do with your processor speed and possibly the room on your hard drive (although that’s a stretch) or ram or just an old motherboard with limited bandwidth.
USB 1.1 has a max transfer rate of 12Mbps. So, for instance, if you a 128 MB camera memory card, and it takes more than roughly 12-15 seconds to download, then it’s not your usb, but a bottleneck somewhere else in your system. If it takes about 12-15 seconds and that’s too long, then you would definately benefit from USB 2.0.
Just a little thing I should throw in here. 12Mbps (Mega bits per second), is not the same at 12 MBps (Mega bytes per second). But in this case I’m treating them the same. The difference would be a kilo bit = 1000 and a kilo byte = 1024, so a mega bit and byte would differ slightly…
Anyways, hope that helps. One more thing, 12Mbps is the MAXIMUM speed, and even though your camera is just passing the images, it’s still possible that the camera is the bottleneck, or the image cataloging program is the bottleneck, etc.
Yes, mine does that also. Wasnt sure why. Also, the speed of transfer the SM card data is in question too. Seems like it should be much faster. I think its transferring at about 1 M/sec. What should/could the transfer speed of the SM card be?
Thanks, makes perfect sense.
However,
Whether I use the cardreader or the camera, the time is the same. Even if I cut and paste the data from the card reader to a folder in the harddrive the time is the same (no software used)- About 1M/sec.
Any way to check that USB port to see what the real data xfer rate is?
BTW- I don`t have any problems with streaming video through the 1395 ports. So I kind of doubt the processor or the motherboard are problematic.
What? A Byte is 8 bits, so 12 MegaBYTES per second is 96 MegaBITS per second. And 12 MegaBITS per second is 12/8 is 1.5 MegaBYTES per second. A significant difference.
Umm…why would you expect there be a speed difference? The camera simply has it’s 1.1 USB card reader in the camera electronics vs the outboard reader. Did you see my note about the inherent limits on flash card speeds? A lot of people think digtial flash card transfer rates should be almost instantaneous since the’re on a a chip, but in actuality in many cases digital media cards have quite pokey data transfer speeds that are lots slower than old fashioned hard disk transfer rates.
i got usb2 scanner. i tried it in both usb 1 and 2, it was about 5 times faster with usb 2.
but i suggest that instead of just paying $40 for an usb2 expansion card like i did. you buy an entire new motherboard and processor ( most of good new ones have usb2 ) . for about $250 you can buy a mobo+processor combo that will be about 5 times faster than what you got now.
gazpacho: A fast one was, indeed, pulled. Devices that were formerly labelled as “USB 1.1” (12mbps) are now labelled “USB2.0 Hi-Speed.” Devices that were formerly labelled as “USB 2.0” (480 mbps) are now labelled “USB 2.0 Full-Speed.” Therefore, if you go to the store and buy a “USB2.0” camera, you may well find that you actually got a USB1.1 device.
A lot depends on your software. My father has an Olympus digital camera and a laptop that is actually faster than my PC. The camera has a USB connection. Using his laptop and the software from Olympus, it would take on the order of half an hour to transfer the data from the camera to the HD. On my PC (using Linux, which treats the camera like a mass storage device) the same transmfer took about five minutes.
I definitely do not have USB 2.0 on my PC, so that can’t be the cause of the difference.
I dug up a bootable Linux CD and used it on his laptop, and the transfer rates using that matched what I was getting on my PC.
Software makes a great difference in such things.
Please note:
This is NOT a “Linux is superior” post. It is a simple account of using different software on the same hardware.
I still don’t see what was pulled. USB 1.0 and 1.1 had two speeds. Low speed 1.5 Mbits used for things like mice and keyboards. Hi speed 12 Mbits. The came USB 2.0 with full speed at 480 Mbits. 12 Mbits has always been called Hi-speed. It was called that in USB 1.0, USB 1.1 and now USB 2.0.
The “fast one” is that most manufacturers of USB devices do NOT state “USB 2.0 Highspeed” or “USB 2.0 Fullspeed.” They simply state “USB 2.0,” and the user can’t tell from the designation if it is fulls speed or highspeed.
Yes, you can look up an online review and find out (if you need to,) but the average user is just going to go “Oh, looky. USB 2.0 - that’s the really fast one. I’ll get it.” Never mind that it is only the “highspeed” model and that another model that costs just a couple of bucks more is a “fullspeed” model. The average user isn’t that savvy, and gets rooked.
It is deception because people looking for USB 2.0 480mb can easily be tricked into buying what was once called USB 1.1 12mbps.
Thinking that if it says “USB 2.0” it must be 480 mbp was once accurate. It seems they are trying to take advantage of the fact that some people may not of heard of the new situation.
This is quite different from a consumer being simply uninformed, IMO. In this case, a consumer may be informed, but had the misfortune to read documentation from before the change. Is it appropriate to expect the consumer to continually re-research standards they thought they already know, in case they have been retroactively redefined?
