external USB transfer speed

rodp

Member
Hi All,

What speed transfers do people mostly get when transferring files to and from an external HDD / USB stick using the front USB on their HDR?

I've just clocked mine and it seems to be only 2Mb/s which is very slow indeed. It's faster for me to use my wifi and ftp out the files it seems but I like the simplicity of the USB.

Are there any ways to improve this if this is the norm?

Thanks
 
What speed transfers do people mostly get when transferring files to and from an external HDD / USB stick using the front USB on their HDR?
From 2011:
Stage 1.8 - Transfer Speeds

I don't know how long the same copy would have taken to a USB memory stick, but copying 5.86GB to the portable drive took about 34 minutes. It only took 3 minutes to get it into the PC! For comparison, I copied 6 half-hour (+padding) radio recordings to a FAT32 USB stick (which means 18 files - no thumbnail on radio recordings), totalling 1.7GB in 9 minutes. The surprise is that it is roughly 200MB/min either to USB hard drive or to USB Flash drive. However, the USB stick then took 1:40 to copy into the PC.

Out of interest I copied the same set of files (undecrypted) by FTP, and on my 11g (I think) link to the PC (AV200 from the Humax) the transfer took 14 minutes. However, for this method to be viable first you need to decrypt the files in the Humax, and we are in the realms of hacked rather than non-hacked.

Are there any ways to improve this if this is the norm?
How? The transfer bottleneck is the ability of the SoC – the USB ports are connected directly to it. The only way to connect another USB adapter would be via... USB! Ethernet is faster, but WiFi (via a USB dongle) will be affected by the same bottleneck.
 
BH's results are ~3MB/s. If videos are being decrypted (Humax -> USB storage), the system wouldn't need to beat an average 0.5MB/s to deliver OTA HD content in real time, so anything better than that is just luck, or engineering margin.
 
Thanks for the replies. The recordings are all sd quality and pre decoded. So i would have thought it would simply be just doing a transfer process, ie more than 2mb/s transfer speed. I hear your point about 0.5mb/s rate but I'm just wondering if there is a way to transfer files faster, eg via a telnet command line or something instead of using the webif front end incase that then bypasses any re-re-decryption? What drawbacks would I need to consider and what commands do I need to use?

Thanks
 
Just been reading around, would i / could I use rsync? Is there any UI i can use or is this just command prompt for the humax? Not entirely sure how I would write the command in order to point to the usb drive.

Thanks
 
Yes, rsync is a command line thing.

How is that going to help when (it sounds line) you still want to send data through the USB interface? You might get somewhere if you use a NAS connected to the Ethernet port.
 
Hi All,

What speed transfers do people mostly get when transferring files to and from an external HDD / USB stick using the front USB on their HDR?

I've just clocked mine and it seems to be only 2Mb/s which is very slow indeed. It's faster for me to use my wifi and ftp out the files it seems but I like the simplicity of the USB.

Are there any ways to improve this if this is the norm?

Thanks
Maybe try a faster USB storage device?
Using the standard UI, I get
10:15 minutes (over 8MB/s) 5GiB directory (28 files total, 7 large, no encryption) from HDR to USB portable hard drive​
Slightly quicker doing same copy from that drive to HDR.​
It may be a little faster using WebIF/browse, but the browser takes a while to refresh.
I find it's usually more convenient to use the network.

Edit1: I repeated the test with 16.1GiB directory (96 files, 24 where > 700MB) and that took roughly 23 minutes. So that works out over 11MB/s.
Edit2: The USB portable drive I used was in fact a SATA2 5400rpm laptop hard drive (dated 2011) attached to USB2/SATA adapter similar to this https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08VHLCG83. It is slow compared to most quality off the shelf portable USB drive available for the last 5-10 years. Bare in mind the HDR will only be able use USB3 drives at USB2 speeds.
 
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