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Appalling USB stick performance, Ibex x86_64

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    Appalling USB stick performance, Ibex x86_64

    I've been having this problem for the last month or so, with USB sticks that worked perfectly until then.

    I have a machine at home, Asus mainboard, dual core Intel CPU, running Ibex x86_64, and two boxes at work, one Dell Optiplex GX620 running the same version of Ibex (same repositories - basically backports, non-free, Medibuntu and Google, upgrades run more or less at the same time on both boxes) and another identical Optiplex running XP.

    At exactly the same moment (after a package upgrade including kernel packages), all my USB sticks stopped running at USB2 speeds - in fact now they write data at variable speeds, starting a transfer at the usual few MB/sec and slowing down after a few seconds to a handful of KB per sec. This happens on both boxes for *all* USB sticks and does not happen on the XP box - which transfers data at what I used to find a sluggish rate (about 10-20% slower than the Linux machines) but is now the fastest available. A brand new USB stick bought for comparison performs in exactly the same way. On occasion, after two or three hours transferring at 2 KB/sec, speed picks up to 8 or 10 MB/sec. Also, reading is unaffected and occurs at the usual high speed. And external USB hard disk performs in the same way.

    I should add that for other reasons I had to reinstall everything from scratch on the work Linux box, and after all the updates went in the situation was the same.

    I have not tinkered *much* with the system configuration on either machine - if you let me know which files might be relevant I'l post them here; but the fact that the problem appeared simultaneously on both systems after a kernel upgrade makes me think it's not a local configuration issue.

    Thanks for any light anyone might shed on this issue (I have the weird feeling it's something extremely stupid I've overlooked, though)

    Eugenio

    #2
    Re: Appalling USB stick performance, Ibex x86_64

    From the lack of replies, I guess I must be the only one with this problem... which is weird as it is occurring on *every* machine on which I have installed Intrepid (I tried the wife's laptop and another PC at work - same thing)

    Oh well.

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      #3
      Re: Appalling USB stick performance, Ibex x86_64

      Only thing I could suggest is that maybe the file system on the USB stick is corrupt. Unmount it and do an fsck /dev/whatever-it-is. Since you say all your USB sticks have slowed down, I suspect there is some glitch in the bus driver. Maybe try reverting to an older kernel, if you have a copy around.
      We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. -- Stephen Hawking

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