N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Hello Everyone,

Since a while my 16GB N9 has a USB transfer rate of 3-4MB/S, in the same conditions my 64 has a transfer rate of 20MB/S... Do you know what could cause that ?

Thank you,

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

check your USB cable, whether you have a slow usb1.1 printer or any such device connected to your pc at the same time as your transfer. Also are you transferring using mass storage or sync and connect. At time of you have hundreds of small files being transferred the speed gets bogged down too...

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Well, my 64GB gives me 20MB/S on the same kind of life on the same cable... So I'm pretty sure it can't come from the cable/pc...

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

I reformatted the partition using FAT32 and 4096 octets in block size and everything is fine now :)

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

I used to think a write transfer-speed of around 3-4MB/s is normal (16GB version). How did you do the reformating?

Connect the phone using mass-storage mode and reformat the partition like any other partition/drive?

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Yes. usb-storage exposes the whole block device, so you can partition and format.

This is also the reason the phone cannot access the filesystem while in USB storage mode, because it cannot mount a filesystem locally and over USB at the same time

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Going FAT32 w/ 4096 cluster size indeed increases the speed up to some 20MB/s. This is a great find. Why the hell hasn't the device been properly formatted from the very beginning?

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

What was your previous cluster size?
I checked mine (with Windows, chkdsk command), and it says 65536 B.

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Yeah, 64KB and I never formatted MyDocs before. This must be the default factory setting.

I bet there are hundreds of people cursing N9's USB speeds not knowing this can be fixed.

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Confirmed! I have just reformated and the speed indeed increased to around 18MB/s. This really is kind of strange, why would Nokia ship the device with 65536 B block size?!

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

What about formatting beyond FAT 4096 clusters?

Any ill effects of doing that?

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

You can always try and let us know. :rolleyes:

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Thank you for your sarcasm.... :rolleyes:

I did and even reformatting beyond anything stock it got me to can't read user data....

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Roger that. I was actually curious myself.

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

so wait, would this also speed up transfers & connections with nokia suite/ would it wipe the system files?

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

I copied emmc stuff to computer and it did load on faster.

It didn't help though, because well, it cant read user data now...

Waiting on a person to tell me if reflash is needed or not...

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Do you mean you can't format it back since it doesn't connect as usb mass storage because of the changed formatting? Hmm ...

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

No, just says can't read user data, everything else works well :)

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

You did try reformatting to FAT32 512/sector and rebooting, didn't you? Why wouldn't it work if done so?

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

I am now trying to trouble shoot to figure out...

Edit: is this on a windows pc or linux?

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

I don't think there can actually be any difference in 'quality' of formatting. Healthy and properly formatted filesystem should always be the same regardless of the tools/os used.

If you don't trust windows and don't have a non-windows system at hand, why don't you download, load on some USB stick and then boot Hiren's BootCD? The disto includes quite many different disk/formatting tools which support usb mass storage media.

If this doesn't help, the problem is somewhere in N9's firmware (maybe detecting incompatible formatting and then getting stubborn about it).

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Trying to reformat using FAT32 on Linux....

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

So Arie, how have you resolved the problem?

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Fat32 at 4kb, also did a reflash before. I don't suggest doing this unless you have just freshly flashed your N9.

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Hi Arie, how did you resolve your problem with the N9 not finding the MyDocs partition? I tried formatting it to FAT32 4096 byte clusters too, and now i cant seem to get my N9 to mount MyDocs at all anymore :S
Thanks!

Edit: Fixed it by restoring the device trought the settings menu.
Not gonna try that again :S

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Are you sure you formatted to fat32 not exFAT? The latter will give yout the error you had while the former wouldn't IIRC...

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

I can also confirm that formatting to 4kb clusters improved USB writing speed to about 18MB/s.

Not only that, it saved a lot of space for me.
Before formatting every file below 64kb still took 64kb of space.
And since there are thousands of such files (cache, config files and especially map files) they took a lot of space.
Now the minimum file size is 4kb instead of 64kb and the amount of wasted space is a lot less.

Before formatting I backed up the whole mydocs partition to my pc so I didn't lose anything.

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Before some of us start breaking, can someone please give us step by step instructions to get this correctly please

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

- Plug in your N9 to the PC using "Use as Mass Storage"

- Backup your device's data to your PC

- In Computer right-click your N9 and choose format

- Choose File system FAT32 and NOT exFAT

- Choose allocation block size to be 4096bytes (4kb)

- Click on Format

- Once done copy back your data to your phone

Voila Done :D

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

how can i do this from mandriva linux? I tried with vista, but that has only 2 formatting options: fat and ntsc, both " breaking" the memory....
Thanks! :)

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

use gparted on linux...

vista has fat32 isn't it?

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Asaik i only got one fat32 option, but after using that, linux told me that i created a exFAT lsb first partition... And that didnt work..

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

if its fat32 it should be fine...I don't remember exactly but i think exFAT option was added only in Win7...

Try formatting using vista if you are comfortable in it and transfer 1-3 files to your device first and see if they get detected...

If you get the error "Cant access user data" on your device, this means it didn't format to FAT32...Then you can use Linux with GParted to do the job for you...

If you have your data all backed-up to your PC even if you format it to XYZ format, you can do a emmc only flash to fix it in the worst case scenario so don't fret ;)

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Thanx, one more question, by backing-up you mean, copy Music Folder, Photo Folder, Videos Folder and Documents? Will the Apps not disappear too? How exactly do we safely back-up and what other folders are important besides ones I mentioned

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Connect as mass storage, whatever you see just copy it to your PC then do the format...And copy back all those once you are done...

Remember you are backing up ~/MyDocs which is the emmc partition so no apps in there just your user data...

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

It might also be a good idea to show hidden files before the backup. Some apps create hidden folders in MyDocs that may not show up unless you switch the file manager on your PC (Windows Explorer, Thunar, Nautilus...) to show all files. If you don't copy those, you may lose a lot of data (maps come to mind).

Sorry if this seems obvious but judging by questions some people ask, it may not be obvious to everybody.

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

I had a backup, but i couldnt for the life of me get the needed programs for flashing a N9 running:
Wine on linux doesnt work well for me, my WinXP partition is fubar, (something about updates which hang the system, requiring me to shut mu pc down by unplugging it :P ) and vista just doesnt install .net 4...
Gonna try again with Gparted :)

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Didnt work, cant set a clustersize with gparted. Cant read userdata error again :S

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Could you post what you did exactly using GParted?

that would allow us to correct any errors made...

Don't worry we'll get it up and running once you give me your steps..

Re: N9 : Slow USB speed
 

Hi TheDead1440,
Thanks for your reply!

- I removed the existing partition using Gparted 0.8.1 (with libparted 3.0),
- I created a new partition using "partition">"new"
- I chose Filesystem ("bestandssysteem") "fat32"
- Entered label "Nokia N9",
Pressed OK, and then the ok button to start all pending changes.
I couldnt find a clustersize-setting anywhere...

I added a (Dutch) screenshot of the gparted "new partition" dialog.
A rough translation of all items on the screenshot in order:
Minimal size = 32MiB
Max. size = 9015 MiB
"free space left (MiB)" = 1
"New size (MiB)" = 9015
"Vree space right (MiB)" = 0
"Allign with" = MiB

"Create as" = Primary partition
"Filesystem"= FAT32