DOS ain't dead

Improving USB transfer rate in DOS (Users)

posted by Zyzzle, 19.03.2010, 04:19

Putting together a very basic box with an MSI G31TM-P35 board (chipset Intel G31 / Intel ICH7)... Booting DOS straight from a USB Flash drive is supported, but I'm experiencing *very* slow read and write transfer rates, less than 50 kb/sec. I assume the problem is legacy USB 1.0 support only in DOS mode, but even with this I should expect transfer rates of 500 kb/sec at least! The board of course has many USB 2.0 plugs. Even my Acer netbook with its puny Atom processor gives me straight DOS transfer rates of between 10 and 15 Mbytes / sec with the exact same 8 GB USB flash drive, which has been formatted in FAT32, 4kb cluster size!

Booting directly off a flash drive is nice, but what DOS drivers, if any, can be placed in Config.sys to improve performance? It must be an ICH7 chipset limitation. UIDE loaded but did not improve performance. It seems I read on this forum some time ago about USB 2.0 driver support in DOS, but now I can't find the thread.

Complete thread:

• Improving USB transfer rate in DOS - Zyzzle, 19.03.2010, 04:19 (Users)
  • Poor USB transf rate when using UIDE driver and no idea why - DOS386, 19.03.2010, 04:36
  • UIDE Does Not Run USB Disk/CD/DVD Drives. - Jack, 23.03.2010, 15:06