Three system configurations have been compared:
- USB 1: Iyonix PC, 512MB, 120GB HD, RISC OS 5.08, USBDriver 0.35, OHCIDriver 0.24. A USB mouse and keyboard were also attached.
- USB 2: Iyonix PC, 512MB, 120GB HD, RISC OS 5.08, USBDriver 0.36, OHCIDriver 0.24, EHCIDriver 0.09. A USB mouse and keyboard were also attached.
- PC: Dell Dimension 4600, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, Windows XP Professional. No other USB devices were attahed.
Pen drive
A 512MB SanDisk Cruzer Mini was used in the following tests. Files were copied to/from the pen drive to the hard drive.
Test 1 - read and write one 53MB PDF file.
Test 2 - read and write 56 files, approx 4-10MB each, total 259MB.
The tests are supposed to be "real world" tasks. That's why I'm using the multi-tasking RISC OS Filer (in "Faster" mode), rather than a single-tasking copy command (even though the latter could potentially be much faster). The PC tests used Windows Explorer. Remember that the efficiency of reading and writing to the hard disc will also affect these timings.
On the graph below, orange bars represent reading, and blue bars writing.
Scanner
This test used an Epson Perfection 1660 Photo to scan an A4 document at 600x600dpi, resulting in a 100MB sprite file. The software - DPlngScan 1.21 and Epson GT Twain v2.10.
Conclusions
The Iyonix USB 2 drivers offer a significant improvement over the older USB 1 drivers. File transfers are approximately four times faster, and scanning speeds are nearly three times faster. We're looking at between 1.70MB/sec and 2.0MB/sec reading, and 1.5MB/sec to 1.7MB/sec writing. That's much better than the 0.45MB/sec available previously.
For me, it's worth the money. The pen drive is a much more useful tool at the Iyonix's USB 2 speeds. Filling the drive to capacity could have taken nearly half an hour before, now it takes less than 6 minutes. Anyone with a lot of digital photos, or a USB backup strategy, will find the new drivers valuable. Time is money, as the saying goes.