Photo transfer is very slow...

NOTE: This has been solved and explained. Read the last post!

I tried searching but couldn't find anything on this. Does anyone else think the USB photo transfers/saves take a REALLY long time? On average it takes one photo a full two minutes to save or transfer over for me. The other night I transferred 12 photos at once, it literally took about 20 minutes. That seems a little extreme to me, what with USB1.1 being 12mbps and all. It seems to me like it should only take a few seconds at most.

Just for reference I'm using a 30GB IDE hard drive with a USB1.1/2.0 enclosure. Filesystem is FAT32. Speeds are fine when connected to a PC even in USB1.1 mode (the entire folder of 12 shots took a split second to copy.)

Are you talking about transfer from PS" memory card to USB or PC to USB, or vice-versa?

Anyway, that seems a bit too extreme to me, even memory card transfer to USB (the slowest transfer of them all) doesn't take nearly as much as that.

well the it really has several things that could be the problem and this is true for every USB or even computer device.
Since you are using USB 1.1 and it uses 12mbps doesn't mean it is actually working at the full 12mbps because of the limitations of how fast the hard drive can write and the amount of info that is being poured in. So if you had USB2.0 that runs at 480mbps you be lucky if you can achieve 12mbps and then again limited by the speed of the drive.
It's like downloading something from the internet. At my job we hav T1 running at 100mbps on the internet yet the fastest downloads I've seen are at 1.XX mbps, fast yes but not the full potential, so if you upgrade to a faster cable (cheaper alternative) then the transfers would occur at a faster rate.

Oh and another problem that occurs is the hard drive could just be burned out and going into state where whenever it is turned on sometimes it spins up and the shuts itself down, so if you put your ear close to it and listen for it to beep and spin up and does that during accessing and writing to the drive than you need a new one.

I used to have a USB 2.0 Flash drive, and i transferred photos all the time.. never took 20 minutes for 12 photos..

Is it because your computer is getting old? Because these images are I believe at least 1 mb.

Okay, let me restate my problem, I wasn't clear enough

The transfer is slow when going from the PS2 to the hard drive. It doesn't matter if I'm transferring from a memcard or saving one I just took in photo mode, it'll still take about two minutes for the USB device.

Just for reference, it's not the speed of the drive or the drive's health that is contributing to this - the drive works fine and I get normal transfer rates when using the drive with computers. And to fordgt150, if a hard drive is running in DMA mode5 (any modern drive on any modern OS, Windows, Mac or Linux, from the last 10 years should be) it will do transfer speeds of around 100mbps. This is the throughput of the IDE channel. That's still as fast as a 100mbit TI line. This is something with GT4 or the PS2.

The images I've got are also between 100-350kb. Those are really small files. You could download those files from the internet on a 56k modem faster than it takes to do a USB transfer for some reason...

I have an old Buffalo Clipdrive, a 256Mb USB stick, and it's superquick. I have a Technika 4Gb USB stick, a much much more modern piece... and it takes ages.

Maybe the PS2 wants to check the entire drive.

Venari

I have an old Buffalo Clipdrive, a 256Mb USB stick, and it's superquick. I have a Technika 4Gb USB stick, a much much more modern piece... and it takes ages.

Maybe the PS2 wants to check the entire drive.

Click to expand...

Hey, that's actually really feasible and I didn't think about it. My best friend has a 512meg jumpdrive, maybe I can talk him into letting me borrow it for a few minutes to test it out. I'll let you know whether it's faster or not.

Thanks.

EDIT: I wonder... what would happen if I format the entire drive and just make one very small (i.e. 128meg) FAT32 partition? I think I'm gonna try that now.

EDIT #2: It is as I thought. I formatted the disk and made one 128meg FAT32 partition at the very beginning of the disk. It's incredibly fast now, like USB should be. I developed some of my film and saved the end result, it took about 5 seconds. It took 3 photos all of 20 seconds to copy from the PS2 memcard to the drive. This speed is a little more acceptable

Now, I'm wondering if I can make a second partition (say, NTFS) for normal PC stuff. If the PS2 will only attempt to mount partition 0 then we'd be in business. Everyone could have a separate small partition just for GT4 stuff and still be able to use their externals for normal things. I'm gonna try this now, I'll get back with the results.

EDIT #3: Again, it worked, just as I expected. I reformatted the entire drive with one 32mb FAT partition at the beginning of the drive and the rest of the disk (27.x GB) as NTFS. At first GT4 told me that there was no USB drive present but I think the cable was just loose. I unplugged it and plugged it back in and Bob's your uncle. It was also even faster than the 128mb FAT32 partition!

So, what we've learned:

*The smaller the size of the partition on the USB drive, the faster the photos will transfer (I find that 32mb FAT is a perfect choice, it's more than you'd ever need and it's blazingly quick.)

*As long as the GT4 partition is the very first partition on the drive you can theoretically have as many partitions/filesystems as you want. It's proven as of now that you can have at least two (including the GT4 partition.)

Ah haha If you go to my Hot & fresh photo thread, you'll have soem cool finds... I dont own a USB drive still but i took my friend's USB and transferred it, man it's Slow as a snail.... took so long.. longer than my previous one..