disappointing usb-otg

[pai]

long post, bear with me...

i bought the x5 for two reasons, to listen to my music on, and to act as portable storage for my digital photos when on trips.

as far as the music side is concerned, i have no complaints. it's great. as a portable storage device however... to sum things up, it's just not going to work, not with my equipment/needs.

here's what i used: iaudio X5L 30gb, konica minolta A2 camera, transcend usb 2.0 card reader, 1gb lexar 40x cf card, 128 mb sandisk sd card (loaded with pictures from a canon ixus 50)

x5 was running on half to 3/4 batt, more than 20gb of space left, firmware 2.07e

it had no problems detecting both the camera and the card reader when connected via usb host function. could navigate both the x5 files/folders and the ones on both cards.

it also had no problem copying then pasting all the 1mb+ canon ixus pictures from the sandisk sd card to itself (via the transcend reader). the pictures could be viewed in picture viewing mode after.

it was only when i wanted to transfer the A2 pictures that i ran into problems. i tried doing this several times via the card reader and the camera itself. i constantly got a "access failure" message every time. a few pictures would download successfully, then the light on the A2, and the transcend reader (depending on which i was trying) would go out, and the failure message would come on.

i'm trying hard to figure out what the problem may be. the manual states that pix above 2.5mb cannot be displayed (annoying, but still ok since i just wanna store them, not look at them). but it doesn't say anything about what kind of files/sizes are not supported by the usb-otg...

at first i thought it was the file sizes. A2 raw files are 11+mb, tiff files are 22+mb. both show up on the x5 navigator as 2 files, the main file and a .thm file. i selected a raw file individually and tried to transfer it to the x5. got the "access failure" error. i tried that with the tiff file - same problem. strangely, i could move the file to a different folder on the cf card itself, just not from the card to the x5.

i then tried it with just jpg files from the A2. sometimes the transfers went ok. the smaller pictures (1+mb) could even be viewed in the picture viewer. the larger pix (5mb) got a "not supported" msg when i tried to view them, but were still successfully moved. but very frequently, the process would stall midway and i'd get that dratted "access failure" again... (after this error, the x5 no longer detects the other device, and has to be switched off and on again before it can connect via usb-otg again)

as far as i can see, what this means is that as far as my needs are concerned, the x5 simply cannot be used for raw and tiff files. and when used with large jpgs, and large numbers of files, it is very very unreliable. i'm not even sure i trust it with small numbers of small files.

this is of course very frustrating. i didn't even bother to record transfer speeds etc (i know some people have been asking for them) because there's no point if 90% or more of the time the transfers just aren't carried out properly. as a usb-otg device, the x5 is useless to me...

i don't know what the problem is. did i get a defective unit? are there issues with my camera or card reader? is the usb otg just unable to deal with files above 10mb? if you guys don't mind, could you try out your own x5s and see how they fare? lots of camera nuts are out there hoping this could be the portable storage device they've been waiting for...

also, where can i send this as a bug report? maybe it can be fixed in firmware, or at least i can stop worrying that it's just my unit that is buggy...

thanks for reading this far

[toda]

hmm i dont have an x5 but am thinking about it and usb-otg is an important feature for me. sucks to see that you're having problems with files that big though. right now with the digi i have, i dont think ill run into that problem. however, im planning on buying a digital rebel XT soon, im wondering if that problem will be the same. =O

hopefully someone has an X5/X5L with a digi that takes RAW/TIFF files to test out.

[Woeberland]

Hi pai,
I just ran a few usb-otg tests while sitting on the toilet. I don't have a camera unfortunately, but I uploaded a tiff, a raw and a jpg compressed image onto my flashsticky. Sizes 20, 18 and 9 MB.
I had used usbotg before and thought it was slow, but the 20 MB tiff took no time. Like 10 seconds I guess. So a quite good usb 1.0 I guess. Anyways, the important: I had no problems copying big files.
My first guess was that your camera simply isn't compatible (yet!?...), but the fact that your cardreader brings the same symptomes leaves me in question. Have you firmware upgraded your unit? Have you tried a usb-stick with big files like me? You should run a few more tests with other devices before we can blame the X5.
Good luck.

[klinikl]

Originally Posted by Woeberland

I had used usbotg before and thought it was slow, but the 20 MB tiff took no time. Like 10 seconds I guess.

Finally someone mentions speed. So one gigabyte card would take about 9-10 minites to transfer?

[Woeberland]

I had to be sure.
Put a 102MB zip file onto the flashstick. Via usb-otg over to X5. Unfortunately it took 3 Minutes 15 seconds!
That wouldn't support my 10 second theory, so I tried the 20MB file again and stopwatched it. 30 seconds, not 10. So it seems like I was too occupied with something else while sitting on the toilet before.

I also copied the 20MB file back to the flashstick which took approximately 1 minute. Not really usb 1.0. Rather usb 0.5 (hehe), but hey: it works!

[pai]

woeberland, thanks for your post...

yeah i'm not sure whether to blame my x5 yet, and i really do hope that this works somehow...

like i said earlier, i thought it was an issue with the file size, but realised even smaller files weren't transferring.

i shall try to find another card reader and try again.

[klinikl]

Thanks for taking time to test it. A bit slow, yeah.

[pai]

ok, cos of woeberland's test, i decided to give it another go...

this time i made sure the camera had a fresh battery, and i set both the auto-off on the camera and the x5 to 10 minutes (more on the x5)

first try with 6 raw files, worked fine... about 70mb.

second try, a mix of jpg, tiff, raw... 45 files in total, 400mb... it died after 36 files transferred, 312mb moved. not perfect, but much better than before.

the 312mb took 14 minutes to move. camera is rated usb 2 full speed. i suppose there's hope...

[Woeberland]

looks like the speed of usb-otg decreases by filesize. Maybe future firmwares will make the function more stable. Don't give up.

[toda]

thanks for the test. at least it works. i know on my iriver H320, USB-OTG only supports USB1.1 so the speed isnt the fastest but for me, as long as it works =)

[pai]

weird. tried another 2 times, once with camera, once with card reader, same set of raw files. both times it failed after less than 10 files. still much better than before, when it couldn't even transfer one raw file. wonder why so inconsistent.

will try with another card reader when i get hold of it...

[Caravaggio]

Yeah, when I first got the X5 I transfered about 800 MB from my iRiver H320 using the USBOTG. It took about 20 minutes. Theres a thread somewhere around here where I mentioned it.

[CheckerBird]

Dunno just how scientific this test is but I just put a 47.5MB wav file onto my X5 via the normal way you hook it up to a PC. This PC only has USB 1.1 ports (it's an older ASUS P4T-E rambus P4 mobo, my DAW recording machine). It took 50 seconds give or take a couple seconds since I only loosely timed it with a wristwatch.

I then copied the wave file from my PC to my Sandisk Cruzer Titanium USB pen drive (the only other USB storage type device I have handy). It took about the same time maybe 55 seconds.

I then fired up the USB host function in the X5 with the Cruzer plugged in and copied the big wave file to a another folder on the X5. It took 90 seconds. Slower than USB 1.x, even though the Cruzer is a USB 2.0 device.

[pai]

ok update. i have tried the transfers with an avixe thumbdrive. it wrecked the drive, which now can't be detected by other computers.

also tried three other card readers - one no name reader wasn't detected, another one froze my x5 each time. a sandisk imagemate 12-in-1 was detected just fine, but only managed to transfer small numbers of small files.

i tried other files too, mp3s, avis. also tried it with different cards. same problem. large numbers of small files don't work. a 100mb avi was successfully transfered from the x5 to the card via the sandisk reader, but could not be moved from the x5 back to the card.

since the sandisk reader was one of those listed as working in the sticky thread, i have this growing fear that i have a defective x5... nooooooooooooooo

[sougen]

Originally Posted by pai

ok update. i have tried the transfers with an avixe thumbdrive. it wrecked the drive, which now can't be detected by other computers.

also tried three other card readers - one no name reader wasn't detected, another one froze my x5 each time. a sandisk imagemate 12-in-1 was detected just fine, but only managed to transfer small numbers of small files.

That sounds pretty scary that it can destroy your thumbdrive! Maybe the X5 overwrote some part of the thumbdrive's firmware? Something similar happened with one of my flash memory mp3 players. But I got a utility from the manufacturer to restore the firmware and that fixed it up.

I've got a sandisk imagemate 12-in-1 as well, so I'll do some transfer tests when I get my X5 next week.