How slow is USB 1.1? I'll tell ya!

[elfs]

Last week, being the loving husband that I am, I sacrified an entire week's worth of Japanese studies and miscelleneous audio so Omaha could take one of my ship gifts from Isilon, my 30GB video iPod, erase the entire hard drive, reformat it for HPFS, and play the new raft of iPod games on its tiny screen. Admittedly, I did play one of the games, Zuma, which was sufficiently addictive that it may yet make a casual gamer out of me. It ate the battery like a bon-bon, however.

So, after her show on Monday, I went to restore the iPod. How long will it take, according to the backup routine? 28 hours. This morning, I checked on it and the report was the same. Good grief.

Comments

[kenshardik]

Yes, but that's 28 Apple^SM hours - which are more stylish and easier to wait through than regular hours!

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

The report is the same? You sure something isn't majorly borked in there?

Oh, hey, I saw where you guys moved... you're like, right up the street from us now. (Work-wise.) Might have to contemplate lunch, if they let you guys out for such...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I meant "the same data rate," not the same length of time. It had fallen to 18 hours when I woke up this morning. It's just that slow.

So where are you now?

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Seven blocks south and one block west, gridwise.

You'd think they'd give the things real USB 2... but I suppose that might encourage Piracy, or even... Linux....

[omahas.livejournal.com]

You'd think they'd give the things real USB 2... but I suppose that might encourage Piracy, or even... Linux....

Already there.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Arrrrrrrrrr! :)

[giza.livejournal.com]

By any chance, is the iPod plugged into an unpowered hub, such as what you might find on a USB keyboard? You might have the same problem I did (http://giza.livejournal.com/310111.html). Plugging it directly into the USB port on your computer's chasis will resolve the issue.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

No, it's a powered hub. The USB connection reports that the device is charging. It's just that between USB 1.1 and the slow average speed of an iPod hard drive, it's going to take that long.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

It is a time user. I back up my server to a 259Gb back-pack USB2.0 drive. I only do incrementals most fo the time, but if I do a full backup, like if I do a major reorg of the archive area, or install a new OS version, it takes two or three days.

Still, it's faster than tape or CD burning of the same amount of data would be!

[katymulvey.livejournal.com]

There's a free-to-play-online version of Zuma (http://www.popcap.com/launchpage.php?theGame=zuma) on the Popcap site. (Requires an ActiveX plugin, though).