PocketPRO USB2.0

[Dave_S]

I just received my blue PocketPRO yesterday afternoon with the now typical paint work blemishes. That was of not much concern to me because I was already expecting it after reading here.

What I did find very interesting was the PocketPRO's nearly complete failure to work correctly with a USB2.0 connection. That was even using the supplied cable instead one of the many I already had laying around. What happened was, that starting the file transfer took a very long time to start and then a few seconds after starting the file transfer failed with a message indicating data errors.

In trying to actually copy some files using the USB connection I made a discovery that may be of use to someone else. After I had tried all the ports on my new desktop WinXP PC, and got so many data errors that anything but a VERY short file would fail to transfer, I tried another approach. I fired up an old WinXP laptop that only had USB1.1 ports and tried the same file transfers again. All the files transferred perfectly!

In an attempt to get file transfers to work on my new desktop WinXP PC I rummaged through my junkbox for a old USB 4 port hub that only supported USB1.1 and connected that to a USB2.0 port on my desktop PC. That forced a downshift from USB2.0 down to USB1.1. With the old USB1.1 four port hub between my PC and my PocketPRO all my file transfers worked perfectly!

I do not know if these results are unique to the PocketPRO that I received, but if they are not maybe this will be of some use to someone else?

[RichyRich]

When I did a speed test on the Pocket Pro's internal storage, I got 10.1 MB/s. Using the included SD card in a USB 2.0 reader, I got 10.6 MB/s, so the Pocket Pro is definitely USB 2.0. If the Pocket Pro had been just USB 1.1, I wouldn't have gotten any higher than 1.5 MB/s (megabytes) or 12 Mb/s (megabits).

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by RichyRich

When I did a speed test on the Pocket Pro's internal storage, I got 10.1 MB/s. Using the included SD card in a USB 2.0 reader, I got 10.6 MB/s, so the Pocket Pro is definitely USB 2.0. If the Pocket Pro had been just USB 1.1, I wouldn't have gotten any higher than 1.5 MB/s (megabytes) or 12 Mb/s (megabits).

I did NOT say that the PocketPRO USB interface is USB1.1

I said that mine had a"nearly complete failure to work correctly with a USB2.0 connection". It did *run* at the USB2.0 interface speeds but the data errors were so high that it was worthless at that speed. I had to purposely force it down to USB1.1 speeds to get it pass data error free.

[theducks]

Your experience with XP is similar to mine.
Hit or Miss.
Mostly miss

The same Hardware (Dell D4600, Intel 82801EB USB chipset. all 8 ports) runs flawlessly with any cable when booted on Ubuntu Jaunty. Only the Astak cable will work, when it will work at all.
If I do manage to get connected (drive letters assigned), the SD card drive appears empty and the onboard storage fails to open.

I just tried on my Toshiba S1135 which has an Intel 82801DB/DBM chipset
It indicated "There may be problems", but I could open the files in both places for viewing. Write failed.
Can people with USB problems and running XP, post the USB chipset (shown in the device manager).

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by theducks

Can people with USB problems and running XP, post the USB chipset (shown in the device manager).

My experience does match yours pretty closely, but unfortunately my PC USB hardware just shows up as "generic" in device manager. I just tried running a SanDisk Cruzer in the same USB port as I was using for the PocketPRO and at it managed a write speed of 8.60 MB/Sec and a read speed of 25.83 MB/Sec completely error free, so I trust my USB port. As in your experience, the only way the PocketPRO shows any life at all on the USB port is if the cable supplied with the PocketPro is used. The interesting thing is that when the PocketPRO is FORCED to downshift to USB1.1 speeds it works flawlessly. From that I am guessing that the problem is hardware related and not software related.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

My experience does match yours pretty closely, but unfortunately my PC USB hardware just shows up as "generic" in device manager. I just tried running a SanDisk Cruzer in the same USB port as I was using for the PocketPRO and at it managed a write speed of 8.60 MB/Sec and a read speed of 25.83 MB/Sec completely error free, so I trust my USB port. As in your experience, the only way the PocketPRO shows any life at all on the USB port is if the cable supplied with the PocketPro is used. The interesting thing is that when the PocketPRO is FORCED to downshift to USB1.1 speeds it works flawlessly. From that I am guessing that the problem is hardware related and not software related.

I have no problems with other USB2 devices in Windows. Unfortunately, all my (3) Windows machines have the same chip series and the same erratic problem.

It runs fine/fast under Ubuntu, any cable. Same hardware (connection), so the physical layer is working.

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by theducks

It runs fine/fast under Ubuntu, any cable. Same hardware (connection), so the physical layer is working.

Hmmmmmmm, I dual boot Jaunty on this box, so I will give that go here and report back to you then?

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by theducks

I have no problems with other USB2 devices in Windows. Unfortunately, all my (3) Windows machines have the same chip series and the same erratic problem.

It runs fine/fast under Ubuntu, any cable. Same hardware (connection), so the physical layer is working.

OK, I just tried USB2 on my PocketPRO with Ubuntu Jaunty, and it worked pretty poorly there too, even with the supplied USB cable. Jaunty was more successful than Windows, but that seems to have more to do with better error recovery in Jaunty. I copied one book from Jaunty to the PocketPRO, and the copy went very well and very fast. I thought, Wow that is great.

So just to be sure, I tried copying a folder full of 108 MegaBytes of books from Jaunty to the PocketPRO, and it performed miserably. The effective transfer rate was far slower than USB1.1 and about three quarters of the books never actually got transfered. The copy process started and stopped erratically and took about 10 minutes to complete. That was far better than Windows was able to do, but it was still very bad. So, I am fairly sure that what I am seeing is a physical layer problem and not in one of the logical layers.

If I force the PocketPRO down to USB1.1 speeds then it works flawlessly with any USB2.0 cable.

[Dave_S]

I tried one more experiment with *my* PocketPRO USB. I went into my PC BIOS and disabled USB2.0 support. With USB2.0 support disabled *my* PockePRO was able to do USB writes and reads successfully. Unfortunately, that method switches all my USB ports to USB1.1, so I went back to using the old USB1.1 hub to slow USB down on one port to where *my* PocketPRO could do transfers successfully. If anyone else has a PocketPRO with a flaky USB port like mine, the BIOS switch might be useful to try?

[Solicitous]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

I tried one more experiment with *my* PocketPRO USB. I went into my PC BIOS and disabled USB2.0 support. With USB2.0 support disabled *my* PockePRO was able to do USB writes and reads successfully. Unfortunately, that method switches all my USB ports to USB1.1, so I went back to using the old USB1.1 hub to slow USB down on one port to where *my* PocketPRO could do transfers successfully. If anyone else has a PocketPRO with a flaky USB port like mine, the BIOS switch might be useful to try?

Have you had issues writing to usb thumb drives or usb card readers?

Given that you've had troubles with both WinXP and Ubuntu then I would agree with it being hardware, but could you have a mainboard issue?

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by Solicitous

Have you had issues writing to usb thumb drives or usb card readers?

Given that you've had troubles with both WinXP and Ubuntu then I would agree with it being hardware, but could you have a mainboard issue?

Thanks for your reply. In a previous post, I mentioned that I tried to verify that possibility by doing a speed test with a SanDisk Cruzer memory stick. I got 27 MB/sec. read speeds with that, and NO data errors. But just to give your suggestion a fair chance, I plugged a USB2.0 CardBus adapter into my laptop to run a USB2.0 test with a completely different USB2.0 chipset. The results were slightly better than my main PC, but still pretty bad. The SanDisk Cruzer still ran 27MB/sec read speeds, but the PocketPRO had so many errors that USBDview warned that the test had large changes in read/write speeds during the test, and the speeds were down around 1 MB/sec. I was able to transfer some of my own files using the USB2.0 CardBus adapter, but only very slowly. Even so, that was better than my motherboard chipset did.

On my main PC, I also use a USB WebCam, a USB mouse, several USB2.0 external hard disks, a USB printer, and some other USB peripherals occasionally. I tried the PocketPRO on several USB ports on the PC, with other USB perpherals disconnected, and the result is always the same. MY PocketPRO USB works just fine when it is forced down to USB1.1 data rates, and works very poorly, or not all, when it is allowed to use the full USB2.0 speeds, and that is with the provided USB cable with the ferrite filter moulded into it.

To me, all this proves that there is some issue with the USB2.0 hardware on *my* PocketPRO, but the problem has different levels of severity depending up the hardware the PocketPRO is interfacing with. Being an electrical engineer, I have a pretty good idea what the problem is, but those kinds of details are probably not worthwhile to go into on a more general interest forum.

FWIW, I just saw on the MyBeBook site that at least one other person using a BeBook Mini ( a Hanlin V5 which is the same device as the PocketPRO) is having about the same problem as I am having with my PockePRO.

[Toeknee]

Sounds like you need to look into a warranty repair/replacement claim.

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by Toeknee

Sounds like you need to look into a warranty repair/replacement claim.

That may be, but my main reason for posting all this was to let others know what *might* be going on if they ran into similar problems.

I understand that new products can have some "birthing pains", and certainly did not mean to disparage Astak in any way. Since only one other person here, and one at the BeBook site, have mentioned similar problems this is hopefully a relatively rare production bug for the Hanlin V5.

I am really not looking forward to another pass through customs, so I will probably just keep the one I have with it's blemished blue paint, and flaky USB2.0 connection, since I have a workaround for the USB problem and don't really care all that much about the paint problem.

[AJ Starr]

I may have missed this in your descriptions, but could your computer not have enough buffer/switching memory set aside. I know in windows you can say for the system to choose or you can set it up for a specific amount.

From your description, to me, it sounds like a buffering problem.

AJ

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by AJ Starr

I may have missed this in your descriptions, but could your computer not have enough buffer/switching memory set aside. I know in windows you can say for the system to choose or you can set it up for a specific amount.

From your description, to me, it sounds like a buffering problem.

AJ

I really do not think that it is a buffering problem, since the problem is pretty much the same in Linux or Windows, and there is no problem at all with any other USB device. The SanDisk Cruzer memory stick got very respectable speeds for a NAND FLASH device.

I *think* the problem is in the drive strength for the USB data pair lines, causing the rise/fall times of the USB2.0 waveform being right on the edge of reliability, and causing data errors. Another one of the things that make me think that is that the PocketPRO works even worse with other USB2.0 cables than the one supplied with the PocketPRO. I have tried other USB2.0 cables, with and without the ferrite filter block, and all of them produce even worse results, up to and including the computer not even recognizing what kind of device had attached to the USB port. All of that smells like physical data integrity problems on the USB2.0 interface. Since USB1.1 uses a 10x slower main clock speed, the signal rise/fall times problems go away when USB1.1 speeds are used.