Wiz File Transfer (From Computer To Sd Card) Slowwwwww

[glossywhite]

Hey. I just got a Wiz - nice enough device, but *WHY* does the file transfer via USB with SD card inside the Wiz, take *SOOOO* long?!. 2Mbps? give me a break!!. Also, when I finished copying a file to the SD card "Movies" folder and ejected the Wiz, where was the video to be found?... nowhere!!. It is a DIVX avi and within the stated resolution. Is this broken functionality... oh look... it just *DROPPED* to 1.4Mbps!!. They better fix this *fast* - it is beyond a (bad) joke.

PS: I am running Ubuntu 9.10 32 bit.

WTF? HELP!!

 

[iprice]

The Wiz is not great for transferring large files over USB You might be better off getting a USB SD card reader (or use your pc directly if you have an SD port). It's not ideal, but it's your only hope, really. Or put up with long, slow transfers.If you have a beer while waiting for each file to download, it won't matter in the end

 

[glossywhite]

The Wiz is not great for transferring large files over USB You might be better off getting a USB SD card reader (or use your pc directly if you have an SD port). It's not ideal, but it's your only hope, really. Or put up with long, slow transfers.

Maybe "utterly CRAP at transferring large files" would be more truthful.

Every other SDHC compatible USB 2.0 flash device in the world can do reasonable file transfer - why should the Wiz be any different?. I am doing a review for a major Wiz distributor - this will be a *gigantic* con in my "Pros & Cons" section - this just isn't good enough, and needs to be fixed. Why should the user keep pulling the card out and putting it into a *separate* SD/SDHC reader?. Do they even test these things properly?.

Imagine the user is in a rush to go out, and wants to transfer X-amount of video/audio/whatever, and has to wait for the Wiz to catch up with itself... people are needing *FAST* file tx dude - this is 2009, and USB 2.0, not RS232!. Pants.

PS: it has dropped *AGAIN* to ~830Kbps!.

 

[sam fisher]

There really is no reason not to have an SD reader/writer these days.

 

[glossywhite]

There really is no reason not to have an SD reader/writer these days.

I have one - it's called "Wiz".

There really is *NO* reason not to have decent USB2 to FAT32 flash device file TX these days.

 

[trentg]

To be fair, you say that every other device like this is fast, but that is not true. I have several cell phones and transferring is as slow as or slower than the Wiz so I use an additional card reader for those too. It's not as big a deal as you're making it out to be.

 

[glossywhite]

To be fair, you say that every other device like this is fast, but that is not true. I have several cell phones and transferring is as slow as or slower than the Wiz so I use an additional card reader for those too. It's not as big a deal as you're making it out to be.

Why should it take > 10 mins to copy a ~700Mb file over USB 2.0 to a FAT32 filesystem?. The interface is touted as "USB 2.0", but so what, if it makes not a bit of difference to USB 1.1?. It *IS* a big deal - imagine if your iPod nano copied so slow - everyone would complain to Apple like crazy!. This is a *genuine* bug/fault and you are trying to pretend it is of no consequence. What is the point in having slow USB on a USB 2.0 device with SDHC?... tell me all the reasons why anyone could ignore this bottleneck...

 

[skeezix]

It is _not right_, but its also not a big deal to the average joe I think; most people have an SDHC card slot in their laptop these days, or any number of ways to write these. (ie: People seem pretty accustomed to popping out the flash in their digicams and copying the photos back to their PC; some do it with the cam, some with other means, but its common.) So while its pretty lame, it is not a huge con. A small con perhaps, but its not a deal breaker. Dealbreakers are things like if the screen didn't work on Tuesdays, or buttons fell off after use for a few weeks, etc. A slow (but working) SD writer is not a huge deal, but its annoying nonetheless.

*shrug*

jeff

edit: ipod nano isn't a good comparison, since it doesn't have expansion slots, only one way to write to it. A better comparison is (say) PSP, which has a memstick slot and writes full speed to it, so there is no need to pop it out of the PSP. Same genre, similar functionality.

 

[glossywhite]

It is _not right_, but its also not a big deal to the average joe I think; most people have an SDHC card slot in their laptop these days, or any number of ways to write these. (ie: People seem pretty accustomed to popping out the flash in their digicams and copying the photos back to their PC; some do it with the cam, some with other means, but its common.) So while its pretty lame, it is not a huge con. A small con perhaps, but its not a deal breaker. Dealbreakers are things like if the screen didn't work on Tuesdays, or buttons fell off after use for a few weeks, etc. A slow (but working) SD writer is not a huge deal, but its annoying nonetheless.

*shrug*

jeff

edit: ipod nano isn't a good comparison, since it doesn't have expansion slots, only one way to write to it. A better comparison is (say) PSP, which has a memstick slot and writes full speed to it, so there is no need to pop it out of the PSP. Same genre, similar functionality.

The comparison is perfectly valid - the point here is R/W speed to the flash, not whether or not the flash is removable; that is beside the point if we're discussing poor media writing speeds.

Comparisons or not, it is very lame - why should I wear out my SDHC slot, when the device is perfectly *capable* of high speed R/W?. Getting round my complaint by telling me there are SDHC card readers, is not a solution to the issue - a solution would have been for GPH to have made *sure* this worked properly, before putting it on the market. I don't have an SDHC card reader - assuming "most people" have one, is just brushing the problem under the carpet. I am not saying it is a dealbreaker, but it *is* an extremely poor show, and noone can deny it.

Please would you mind explaining *why* it is so slow, instead of giving me every way to get around it - my point is that file TX *IS* broken, and I would appreciate knowing what is being done to fix it; assuming everyone has an SD slot is just avoiding the subject entirely, and defeats one of the reasons for a data cable - why is it even included, when I can get faster file TX on USB 1.1?!. I'd like an honest opinion on this matter, not to be told of all the (very obvious) ways I can do what the *device* is meant to do. It isn't even as if this is a proprietary device that has been reverse engineered, and USB is a hack - this is device running free software, and the code to ensure this works as it should, has had *AGES* to be fixed.

You cannot possibly quantify what is or isn't a "huge deal" to everyone you sell to - they tell *you*, in the same way that I am telling you that this is a poor show, to have not had it properly and exhaustively tested before going to market.
Thanks dude

 

[hcf]

You are asking the wrong people, and I think your method of conducting "research" for your article, that being asking some web forum, is suspicious at best.

But that said, my suspicion is with the lf1000 driver (software driving the Wiz's "USB client" hardware chip). The lf1000 driver is not part of the 2.6.24 kernel, it was patched in, and it appears to have been a very early piece of work. In particular, the driver's bulk endpoint drivers are indicating a "FIXME" that the I/O is not presently interrupt driven, due to some unexplainable corruption of the request list when that method was first tried.

So, it seems that the lf1000 driver is polling for read and write events to complete; but it doesn't do this in a loop. It does it on competing interrupts. It seems likely to me that this is the source of the slowdown. Note that the lf1000 driver is still not part of the official linux kernel distribution as of 2.6.31 (and I doubt it ever could be in its current form due to an apparently missing link in the copyright chain). The Wiz uses a heavily modified 2.6.24 apparently greatly leveraging the work cozybit.com did on the Leapfrog Didj (Brian Cavagnolo at cozybit.com wrote the lf1000 driver, and cozybit.com claims only to have worked on the Didj project).

The file_storage module used to expose the MMC as a block device to your host computer is part of the standard linux 2.6.24 kernel, and from a cursory examination it seems to be fairly well fleshed out, using a double-buffer for performance. There is evidence of significant peer review and that review doesn't seem to have materially changed the file_storage driver even up to 2.6.31; the patches have only minor tweaks. It's not impossible, but I would be surprised if any of them had as significant an impact on performance as the lf1000's self-admitted FIXME.

So the answer to your question may be that the reason the Wiz has this problem is because the Leapfrog Didj has this problem. But I don't even know if the Didj has this problem.

You really should ask someone who knows the answer, and not random forumites who are guessing at the work others did and placed inside a black box for us not to observe.

 

[mies]

Few quick thoughts.. I have to agree with HCF - that you should be directing your questions to GamePark. Especially if you are intending to give a fair review. In any case, completely slamming the product based on a secondary feature doesn't really sound fair to me. it's a game machine, not a external USB to SDIO drive.

As to the methodology of testing - make sure you are using a SD Card with a higher SD Class (speed rating). If you use a lower class you are going to get bad number irrespective of the method you use to transfer the files.

 

[torpor]

The reason things are slow on the file copy is because there are too many layers between the USB gadget driver and actual file i/o to the SD card. The wiz is not talking to the computer like an embedded microcontroller (as is usually the case in USB sticks), it is emulating the language that your computer and the typical embedded controller would be talking in order to make things appear to be a disk on your PC. It is doing this, slowly, because its doing other things too, such as some silliness with the file system layout, itself.

So another way to solve this problem of file transfers is to not use the device like a disk, but instead a server. Get gadget_eth working, and scp your files over, and it could go a bit faster..

Another thing that can cause these slowdowns is an improperly mounted filesystem option, such as the use of atime, which updates file times every time they are changed, and can really really complicate things on an SD card. I have not seen if this is the case in the Wiz, in fact I haven't had much bother with this side of the Wiz because I have a perfectly fast set of SD reader/writers on my desk, and I prefer to set everything up for the Wiz without involving the Wiz. Which is a pity, so 90's.

 

[glossywhite]

The reasons are irrelevant to the end user, who may not be a geek - the fact is, this slow USB is a very badly implemented example of a useful and convenient feature which *should* work. I don't care about *why* it does or doesn't, and nor will they; if it doesn't transfer @ USB 2.0 speeds, people are going to get upset, and rightly so. While you guys are mainly GP2X nerds, you *have* to pull yourselves out of geek mode for a minute, and remember about the real world where people don't know about the technical aspects. Take a customer perspective - if a guy buys a digital camera from a shop, plugs it into his PC and the JPEGs take half an hour to transfer, do you seriously think he *cares* why it is so slow?. The camera would just be returned to the store - another missed sale.

 

[strider_mt2k]

I thought it interesting that when I ordered my Wiz it shipped with a free SD card reader.

At first I thought it might be to get around any initial issues with Windows 7, but later realized that it was a very pragmatic move on the part of the seller to help reduce returns centered on this flaw.

As it is, I just don't want to put any more wear on that 1990's cell phone connector they're using, so a card reader was employed right off the bat.

 

[glossywhite]

Really, this is just completely and utterly ridiculous!. I just tried to transfer 1.1.0 firmware in extracted form, to the Wiz with a 2Gb SD card in it... FOURTY FIVE minutes remaining?!. This is terrible - GPH need to get on the case and fix it, NO excuses!.


[EDIT] Oh great, and NOW it says "insert the SD card"... WTF?!. It worked fine earlier, and now it says it is not there?. What a POS.

 

[iceedogg]

I thought the same thing, but I just went out and got a $9 SD card reader from Walmart. For 9 bucks you can't really go wrong.

 

[Orion4874]

I would try a different sd card. Make sure that the card is class 6. I never use a reader to tranfer files and my tranfer times are nowhere near that slow. I use an A-data class 6 and never have any problems.

 

[glossywhite]

I would try a different sd card. Make sure that the card is class 6. I never use a reader to tranfer files and my tranfer times are nowhere near that slow. I use an A-data class 6 and never have any problems.

I just bought an SD card reader from "Poundland" for... well, you can guess the price!. Now it transferred the same file in 2 mins . As for only using class 6 cards, I disagree with you - that is overkill.