Attempting to get USB High Speed (480mbps) transfer speed
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If I fit a 3 way IDE cable to my hard disk and motherboard I can use the middle connector for my IDE to USB converter. The IDE2USB has a USB 2.0 High Speed port and a Firewire port.
The point is so that tranfers bypass the current onboard limitation of USB 2.0 Full Speed (12mbps) and gives me High Speed Transfers. I.e. instead of taking an 30 minutes to transfer 2Gb it would take a minute.
Problem is windows cant read this disk because it seems to be in a format Windows cant work with
Seeing as the disk is connected via USB I fired up elinker in the hope that it will see the drive and through it allow me to see recordings on the disk and away i go with high speed transfer - but no. Elinker seems to want to go through the hummy to know the contents of the disk, as it keeps saying to switch the PVR on when I press connect. So I cant use elinker using a direct hard disk connection. I wonder if the topfield is like this - i.e. the transfer utility needs to go through the PVR to access recordings over USB.
So I wanted to put this out there a bit more and ask if any one here knows how it will be possible to see the contents of the hard disk (recordings) using another tool/software so that they can be transfer high speed?
The point is so that tranfers bypass the current onboard limitation of USB 2.0 Full Speed (12mbps) and gives me High Speed Transfers. I.e. instead of taking an 30 minutes to transfer 2Gb it would take a minute.
Problem is windows cant read this disk because it seems to be in a format Windows cant work with
Seeing as the disk is connected via USB I fired up elinker in the hope that it will see the drive and through it allow me to see recordings on the disk and away i go with high speed transfer - but no. Elinker seems to want to go through the hummy to know the contents of the disk, as it keeps saying to switch the PVR on when I press connect. So I cant use elinker using a direct hard disk connection. I wonder if the topfield is like this - i.e. the transfer utility needs to go through the PVR to access recordings over USB.
So I wanted to put this out there a bit more and ask if any one here knows how it will be possible to see the contents of the hard disk (recordings) using another tool/software so that they can be transfer high speed?
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In any event, try booting one of the Linux Live CDs - Knoppix probably has the best hardware detection algorithms. As it runs from the CD drive, its a little slow to load, but once running its quite quick. Knoppix supports just about every file system going. If that doesn't recognise it, you're stuck! And because its running from the CD, you won't disturb your windows installation.
Knoppix will initially load your hard drive partitions as "read-only", so if you want to save anything to disk, you'll have to remount the relevant partition as "read-write" (right click on the icon).
Hope this helps!
Pete.
No, the Humax doesn't use Linux or any of the filing systems that it supports so Knoppix won't help.
Someone on here has previously mentioned the operating system and the filing system that goes with it..... anybody remind me ?
Frank
It should be possible to write a filing system driver for Linux, or even with more work for Windows, but someone has to do the work...
Actually, for Linux you could use Fuse and write it all in user land with your favourite scripting language.
Ian
I am really thumbling around as I dont really know what I am doing, but I downloaded a USB tool to verify what the hummy USB device is. It says that the Humax is a USB 2.0 device with the transfer speed set at Full Speed. Apparantly there is some sort of table the USB driver looks at on the hummy USB device and this table has a bit defining what the USB transfer speed is set at so the USB driver/PC knows which speed setting to go to when utilising the device. The tool reported on the hummy USB deices 'Device Descriptor' that the bcdUSB was 0x0200 (which apparantly means USB 2.0). And that in the 'ConnectionStatus' part the bit that says Device Bus Speed is 'Full'.
I did a transfer test using the tool (USB Info). There was two test types: Special RAW USB and Real-Time.
On the Special RAW USB my maximum transfer rate from PC to hummy was 21.574MBytes/sec; and from Hummy to PC the maximum was 22.774MBytes/sec.
Using the Real-Time test, maximum transfer fromPC to hummy was 12.053MBytes/sec; and maximum transfer from hummy to PC was 14.990.
I dont know whether readings are normally in MBytes/sec or Mbits/sec so I did the last test to report Mbits: In Real-Time test, maximum transfer speed from PC to hummy was 96.420Mbits/sec and from hummy to PC it was 119.919Mbits/sec
Is it possible for the USB driver provided by Humax to ignore the Full Speed note on that table on the hummy and make it connect with high speed transfer speed anyway? I guess this assumes the USB chipset/hardware on the hummy is capable of both full and high speed.
Found a zipped up pack of what looks like source files for elinker/USB driver on humaxZone (although I could be wrong as I dont know anything about source files/coding etc :http://www.humax-zone.tv/index.php?page=development
I would imagine the filesystem is propreitary, which would mean there are no drivers for Windows or Linux. It depends on whether the software is written on a RTOS (which I would have though it is). It possibly uses a built in filesystem in VxWorks or something - could even be Linux ext2 or ext3, although a previous post suggests it's not.
Yes; Altair is a USB tool, that expects to talk its own protocol.
When you use one of these USB to IDE bridges, you're going to get the protocol that's built into the bridge, which will be the USB Mass Storage stuff. eLinker won't be expecting to talk with that, but with the protocol that the firmware uses.
The only way you're going to be able to do anything is by finding out the details of the filesystem, and creating a tool to read it, which is not a tool for the faint-hearted.
Nigel.