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jmc2
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dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:21 am

I thought that usb flashsticks were the way to go with installing/running programs.
But I'm finding my optical drive is much faster.

I tested the usb flashstick reading at 29MBs.

Booting with "W7 install" to the first screen where you get to chose the language...
the dvd gets there in 2:50 minutes/seconds.
The flashstick take more then 4 minutes!

Sounds normal?

Thanks,
jmc2
 
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:24 am

Sounds like you are getting USB 2.0 speeds.
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:37 am

See the article below.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Measuring-CD-ROM-and-DVD-ROM-Performance/61
According to that, 1x DVD-ROM is equal to 1.35MB/s. You'll have to multiply by whatever "x" your DVD drive is. The largely common ASUS DVD Burner (I hate mine, but thats another story) runs at 24x for DVD reads: 1.35MB/s x 24 = 32.4 MB/s. So the DVD install should be a bit quicker (~12% theoretically), but not 40% quicker like you're seeing.
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:37 am

No, that does not seem right. Most DVD drives have a read speed of 16X, which is only 22 MB/sec at best (for the outer tracks). Furthermore, the DVD should be getting clobbered relative to the thumbdrive on seek time.

As a guess, maybe the bootable USB support in your BIOS is really brain-dead, and is preventing you from getting the full 29 MB/sec that the thumbdrive is capable of.
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:39 am

DPete27 wrote:
The largely common ASUS DVD Burner (I hate mine, but thats another story) runs at 24x for DVD reads: 1.35MB/s x 24 = 32.4 MB/s. So the DVD install should be a bit quicker (~12% theoretically), but not 40% quicker like you're seeing.

No, 24X is the write speed; it is only 16X read. The fastest DVD-ROM drive I've found (for reads) in a quick Newegg search is 18X.

And as I noted in my previous post, the DVD has really crappy seek time which should slow it down even more.
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:41 am

In the last generation hardware (C2D vs Athlon/Phenom II days), I did find USB booting on the AMD motherboard to be slower.

That said, for DVDs, that top line speed means nothing since Windows does not even go to the outermost track as it does not completely fill up the disc. And then there is the random seeks of the files. USB flashstick on the other hand, depending on how many small file reads there are during the installs, should stay pretty much the same in terms of transfer rate.
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:48 am

Flying Fox wrote:
That said, for DVDs, that top line speed means nothing since Windows does not even go to the outermost track as it does not completely fill up the disc.

Yup. So average transfer speed of the DVD in this case is probably more like 14.5 MB/sec (educated guess based on the size of a Win7 ISO).
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 10:04 am

I agree with Flying Fox. I always install Windows 7 using flash drives and for some reason on AMD systems it takes far longer to boot into the Windows 7 setup program than it does Intel systems. After that though, it still blows past any DVD drive.
 
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 10:13 am

5150 wrote:
I agree with Flying Fox. I always install Windows 7 using flash drives and for some reason on AMD systems it takes far longer to boot into the Windows 7 setup program than it does Intel systems. After that though, it still blows past any DVD drive.

Good point -- overall install time (not just time to boot to the initial screen) may still be much better with the flash drive.
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 10:43 am

Now that I am more awake to read this...

jmc2 wrote:
Booting with "W7 install" to the first screen where you get to chose the language...
the dvd gets there in 2:50 minutes/seconds.
The flashstick take more then 4 minutes!

Yup, this is mostly boot. The big file transfer is after you have selected all your options. Setup loads minimal files so that it shows you the GUI and gather some input. Unless you are installing from network boot there should be minimal drivers loaded as well. You are correlating the transfer speed with setup boot incorrectly.
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DPete27
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 2:06 pm

Hmm, I learned something today. (then again, I had the feeling my theoretical DVD transfer rates would get shot to pieces) Anybody know what percentage of a Win7 install is random reads? I figured it would be mostly sequential.
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 2:43 pm

The install media deploys from a .WIM archive to the disk. The .WIM is about 3GB in size. I'd presume that the extraction is very sequential in nature.

The DVD should still pan out to be slower than a good USB 2.0 (or 3.0) stick. Mind you there are some very cheap TLC flash drives out there. I've seen some top out with reads 10-15MB/s range.
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 6:45 pm

jmc2 wrote:
I thought that usb flashsticks were the way to go with installing/running programs.
But I'm finding my optical drive is much faster.

I tested the usb flashstick reading at 29MBs.

Booting with "W7 install" to the first screen where you get to chose the language...
the dvd gets there in 2:50 minutes/seconds.
The flashstick take more then 4 minutes!

Sounds normal?

Thanks,
jmc2


There's a bug on some workstations with the USB chipset reading incredibly slow in native / dos mode, I have the problem with a lot of HP DC 7600 machines I build, it's exceeding 5 minutes to get to the Win7 install screen, after that it seems to load proper 32bit drivers and it's fine.
Many machines don't have this problem - but for the sake of convienience I still stick with the USB - I just use 2 of them incase I'm doing multiple installs - saves my time.
 
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Fri Feb 10, 2012 6:53 pm

Perhaps the BIOS is using the USB equivalent of PIO mode to access the thumbdrive?
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jmc2
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Sat Feb 11, 2012 10:37 am

hmm, interesting.
Usb is 2.0
I've never done a whole W7 install with the usb once I saw how slow it was.

I was doing several "install boots" to get to the language screen so I could
"shift F10" to a com window and do diskpart and bootsect in a 64 bit environment.
(only had 32 bit Xp). So I had a feeling for the speed when I finally created the
bootable flashstick and went "What The Heck is going on!"

Also booting to a Acronis boot disk for disk image and Disk Director is also much faster.
Just under 1 minute for CD (not dvd) and over 2 minutes for the 29 MBs flashstick.

Must be as mentioned, poor USB boot support in bios.
I read about how fast usb installs are with flashstick.
Not with a Gigabyte X48 DQ6 from 2008. (bios updated)

Plan on replacing it this spring with Asus Sabertooth X79 and 3930 hexcore.
I check daily to track prices at Newegg. In the last month-plus I saw the cpu available ONE day.
(last monday). Hope the price premium drops by this spring.

Thanks a lot for all the thoughts
(I'll try bootable flashsticks again when I build my next computer.)
jmc2
 
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Sat Feb 11, 2012 1:01 pm

Just come back and tell us after you have seen the actual file transfer phase and then we can talk. ;)
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Re: dvd faster then (flashstick-29MBs) ?

Sat Feb 11, 2012 1:44 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Perhaps the BIOS is using the USB equivalent of PIO mode to access the thumbdrive?


Strikes me that it's probably doing a fallback to USB 1.1 and a whopping 12mbit/s (1.5MiB/s).

I don't really recall how efficient USB 1.1 was with its' throughput, but if it has the same 50% loss as USB 2.0 that would drop the stick down to read speeds of 750KiB/s. That'd be roughly equivalent to a mid-90s CD-ROM.
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