usb stick speed very low

English Hardware
1

Hi openSuse friends,
I just was shocked.

A friend of mine came along and wanted some data (1 gb) from my dell inspiron 9400.

So I grabbed my usb stick and started copying and it took a lot of time (speed was between 2 and 15 MB/s)

Then he copied also data on the stick (also about 1 GB) and it was a_lot faster! Since he is a Mac user, he immediately told me that it is a proof of the superior Mac OS X (bla bla …)

To cut a long story short:
Is there a way to get USB write / read performance faster on opensuse?

2

You maybe forcing your system to use USB 1.1 instead of 2.0

Compare apples to apples first. I actually have had some issues with a card reader, as in it will work if I plug it into an extternal(1.1) but on mobo(2.0) it won’t work.

So first confirm that your own system isn’t USB 1.1.

3

Hi FeatherMonkey,
thanks for your reply.

My system is definitely not USB 1.1
I tried again to copy some big files on a stick.
The problem seems to be, that file transfer just stops (delayed) very often or gets really low.

So how can I get my usb working with full usb 2.0 performance?

4

Can you tell us what file system you’re using on memory stick? Also, what is the output of

lsmod |grep hcd

We’re looking for ‘ehci-hcd’ kernel module.

Also, maybe do

dmesg |tail

and plug in device. Post output.

5

There may be one other problem. The ehci_hcd module should be loaded
before either ohci_hcd or uhci_hcd. A lot of strange things happen
when this condition is not met. Recent kernels warn when this happens.
I have made a Bug report for 11.2, but I first observed it in 11.1.

To fix this, use YaST => System => /etc/sysconfig Editor => System =>
Kernel => INITRD_MODULES and add ehci_hcd to the list.

6

Thanks for the info iwfinger. Interesting.