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I forgot how slow USB is...
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Jessica Lares
macrumors G3
bunnspecial
macrumors G3
A week or two ago, I was installing programs on one of my Cubes. This particular one had a dead optical drive(at the time) so I was stuck working with dmgs off a USB.
This wasn't a big deal, as I keep dmgs(or ISOs or SMIs as appropriate) of my "standard" programs on my iMac G4 as backups in case my media is damaged(I never use original media for "working copies), which(fortunately) has USB 2.0. It took me just a few minutes to load up a flash drive on the iMac with everything I wanted.
It then-in turn-took several hours to get everything I wanted off the flash drive onto the Cube.
I hadn't torn into one at that point, so didn't realize that removing the hard drive isn't actually the major surgery I'd made it out to be. In retrospect, I should have either pulled the hard drive, or even booted the Cube in TDM and boot off its hard drive to install software from another(USB 2.0) equipped computer.
If USB 2.0 had never come along, Firewire would likely have gained a LOT of traction in the PC community...when it comes to sustained transfers, FW400 is "in the real world" a fair bit faster than USB 2.0 since it can actually maintain close to its rated speed.
This wasn't a big deal, as I keep dmgs(or ISOs or SMIs as appropriate) of my "standard" programs on my iMac G4 as backups in case my media is damaged(I never use original media for "working copies), which(fortunately) has USB 2.0. It took me just a few minutes to load up a flash drive on the iMac with everything I wanted.
It then-in turn-took several hours to get everything I wanted off the flash drive onto the Cube.
I hadn't torn into one at that point, so didn't realize that removing the hard drive isn't actually the major surgery I'd made it out to be. In retrospect, I should have either pulled the hard drive, or even booted the Cube in TDM and boot off its hard drive to install software from another(USB 2.0) equipped computer.
If USB 2.0 had never come along, Firewire would likely have gained a LOT of traction in the PC community...when it comes to sustained transfers, FW400 is "in the real world" a fair bit faster than USB 2.0 since it can actually maintain close to its rated speed.
Jessica Lares
macrumors G3
I think the only USB 1 machine I ever had was my Compaq (I'm not counting my PowerPCs). But this was like when Windows XP first came out. I remember my first SanDisk thumb drives being 128MB which I thought was amazing at the time. Could hold more than my 16MB card in my Olympus P&S then anyway. 😀
Yeah, it would have been interesting if firewire had taken off. We did have a HP with one port. It was the only way I could sync my CDs to my new third gen iPod until I could get a USB version of the charger.
Traverse
macrumors 604
Man, I forget how far we've come. I remember paying $50 for a 2GB USB flash drive! I still miss my old Gameboy Color.
I feel old now!
____________________________
I remember my first computer was a home built Windows 95 system when I was 6. It had no internet but it had what I think was USB...maybe not. I just used it to play Sonic R.
I remember taking a business applications class in middle school, circa 1997. That computer lab was still using Windows 3.1 machines. My family's first computer was a Compaq desktop with a Pentium Celeron, 64 MB of RAM, and a 6 GB HDD. This computer was a Christmas gift in 1998. I remember thinking to myself that we would never use all the space on the hard drive. We had that computer until 2004 with never a hardware or software upgrade. It was donated to someone after I graduated high school. Talk about feeling old: I had an original Game Boy. I wish I still had it...
poiihy
macrumors 68020
Usb 1.1 has transfer speed up to 1.5 megabytes per second. Usb 2.0 has transfer speed up to 60 megabytes per second. Usb 3.0 has speed of 640 megabytes per second.
Extreme differences.
And these are only the maximum. Usually the real world speeds are about half.
This is why you should have a USB 2.0 card in your G4 if it only has USB 1.1.
Extreme differences.
And these are only the maximum. Usually the real world speeds are about half.
This is why you should have a USB 2.0 card in your G4 if it only has USB 1.1.
Last edited:
poiihy
macrumors 68020
bunnspecial
macrumors G3
No G4 tower has USB 2.0, and this is a good suggestion for those applications. I have USB 2.0 cards in the G4(and G3) towers that I use. It's worth mentioning, however, that you don't actually get USB 2.0 speeds until late revisions of OS X 10.2(I think 10.2.6, but wouldn't swear to that). Of course, USB 2.0 work fine in OSX 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5. Forget it in OS 9.
With Powerbooks, at least, you can also get a USB 2.0 PCMIA card, although in my case it requires making a decision about whether I want USB 2.0 or WiFi that actually works(the latter usually wins out).
And, unfortunately, USB-equipped all in ones, as well as iBooks(and the Cube) are out of luck unless they have USB 2.0 built in. All iBook G4s have it, no iBook G3s did. iMac G4s got it in Sept. 2003, and eMacs in April 2004.
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
Old man AF story time:
For about a decade, I did on-site computer repair. As in: going to people's houses or businesses to fix their computer problems. (Like Geek Squad, but before they were big.)
Lots of random jobs. Of all sorts. My to-go computer at the time was my original, 867 MHz PowerBook G4 with Combo Drive. (Still have it, still works great, original battery still holds more of a charge than a MacBook Pro battery bought in 2009.)
Had a job where a customer's computer was ultra-slow, crashing fairly often. Quick look - hard drive is full. Less than 1 MB free space on Windows 98, on a 4-6 GB hard drive. I tell him he'll need to clean up files. A glance around the hard drive, and he has a folder that's taking up a good 3 GB. Is that safe to delete?
Nope. He must have it. But most of it is archived material, so if I can put it on CD for him, that'll be fine.
Well, his laptop doesn't have a CD burner. Nor does it have Ethernet. (He used dial-up internet.) The only method I have to get data from his laptop to mine to burn the CDs is a USB hard drive.
Yup, USB 1.1 on both machines. I copied ~3GB over USB 1.1 twice, then burned the files over 5 CD-R discs.
He told me the files were confidential work files, I couldn't look in the folder. (The folder was named "work" or similar, and had subfolders of that were just years, I didn't look any further than that.)
But, of course, as the files are copying (SLOOOOOWLY) I can see their files names as the copy dialog box goes. (The customer was in another room at this point, I was just watching the progress bar go by.)
Porn.
Lots of porn.
75% of this hard drive porn.
And since he had dial-up only, it meant he had been downloading it over dial-up. No wonder he didn't want to give it up - it had to have literally taken years to download it all! (Presumably the year-dated folders.)
So he paid me a few hundred dollars to transfer porn from his ancient laptop to CD-R discs. I was rather glad for the slow USB 1.1, as I got paid to watch a progress bar tick by. (No, I didn't save it - that USB drive was solely for "customer data transfer" and I always reformatted it in the customer's presence after use every time.)
For about a decade, I did on-site computer repair. As in: going to people's houses or businesses to fix their computer problems. (Like Geek Squad, but before they were big.)
Lots of random jobs. Of all sorts. My to-go computer at the time was my original, 867 MHz PowerBook G4 with Combo Drive. (Still have it, still works great, original battery still holds more of a charge than a MacBook Pro battery bought in 2009.)
Had a job where a customer's computer was ultra-slow, crashing fairly often. Quick look - hard drive is full. Less than 1 MB free space on Windows 98, on a 4-6 GB hard drive. I tell him he'll need to clean up files. A glance around the hard drive, and he has a folder that's taking up a good 3 GB. Is that safe to delete?
Nope. He must have it. But most of it is archived material, so if I can put it on CD for him, that'll be fine.
Well, his laptop doesn't have a CD burner. Nor does it have Ethernet. (He used dial-up internet.) The only method I have to get data from his laptop to mine to burn the CDs is a USB hard drive.
Yup, USB 1.1 on both machines. I copied ~3GB over USB 1.1 twice, then burned the files over 5 CD-R discs.
He told me the files were confidential work files, I couldn't look in the folder. (The folder was named "work" or similar, and had subfolders of that were just years, I didn't look any further than that.)
But, of course, as the files are copying (SLOOOOOWLY) I can see their files names as the copy dialog box goes. (The customer was in another room at this point, I was just watching the progress bar go by.)
Porn.
Lots of porn.
75% of this hard drive porn.
And since he had dial-up only, it meant he had been downloading it over dial-up. No wonder he didn't want to give it up - it had to have literally taken years to download it all! (Presumably the year-dated folders.)
So he paid me a few hundred dollars to transfer porn from his ancient laptop to CD-R discs. I was rather glad for the slow USB 1.1, as I got paid to watch a progress bar tick by. (No, I didn't save it - that USB drive was solely for "customer data transfer" and I always reformatted it in the customer's presence after use every time.)
bunnspecial
macrumors G3
That's dedication and very funny.
Without incriminating myself, I'll just make a mention of the fact that we got broadband in the spring of 2001, which right after I turned 13. Of course, I loved having faster internet(dial-up didn't seem that slow until you'd used broadband) but for a 13 year old boy it had a lot of other perks...
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
You missed out on the frustration and pain of taking five minutes to download a .gif over 2400 baud dial-up, to view on a black and white screen, only to discover the file name was misleading, and it was a picture of a car....
poiihy
macrumors 68020
I hated dial up internet. It often took several tries to connect with those accompanying stupid fax squeaks and squawks. Then trying to download updates for Jagwahr only for it to conk out on the final leg and having to restart, plus you paid for dial-up by the minute. Thank god for download managers.
If I transfer data between my usb-disadvantaged Macs I find a network cable with file sharing turned on to be the quickest solution and no faffing about trying to find some space on a FW drive.
Gamer9430
macrumors 68020
Well, my parents had a few computers before I came along... They had 2 386 computers, which the second one was dated at the time they bought it. Then they bought a top-of-the-line Dell Dimension XPS T500. That was my childhood computer right up until 2011, when it died and I got my MacBook Pro. It was one of the best computers I've ever used. It had a Pentium 3, great Diamomd video card, decoder card, Zip drive, CD/DVD-ROM drive, floppy drive, eithernet, 56k modem, and of course, USB 1.1. Now Windows 98 never had full USB support, so you would have to put it in yourself and then you could use flash drives. After the computer died, I tried so hard to get it running again, and last year I finally got it running again, after swapping the Pentium 3 with a Pentium 2. I was very pleased with myself. So I was using it again and successfully got it on the Internet using eithernet, which my parents never installed right, so the computer was never updated. Now you can't update it, so I got the flash drive software and installed it from a cd. But boy was USB 1.1 slow, I couldn't really use it for much because of how slow it was.
Well that's my little USB 1.1 story...
Well that's my little USB 1.1 story...
tevion5
macrumors 68000
It's like a snail, in glue, against the wind, going uphill, pulling a bag of coal.
MagicBoy
macrumors 68040
Dronecatcher
macrumors 603
Luxury compared with Serial connections for Palm Pilot & Pocket PC devices - screaming along at about 15 kilobytes a second!!!
tevion5
macrumors 68000
Slowest I've dealt with is doing Hard Disk copies over a LocalTalk network, and saving and loading files from an Apple II to a cassette. Now that is for the patient!
Can take over a minute to load 20K... 😛