UMS vs IMM transfer speed

[tristan]

What are your experiences with UMS vs IMM as far as file transfer speed?

I recently went back to using the IMM firmware and the speed increase is absolutely amazing - I can put 250Mb worth of music onto the player in 5 minutes. Using UMS it would take 12-15 minutes. As far as I'm concerned the speed increase (and 320kbps recording limit) outweigh the lack of USB drive flexibility.

No real reason for this post, I was just happy about it!

[JohnnyTest]

I agree with you totally. Over the past few months I have waited for a Full Recording UMS version of the firmware, but so far no dice. I have kinda given up hope and went back to the IMM. I can definetly say that the speed increase is great, and that the full recording is so nice to have.
UMS doesn't really have much of a point anymore, unless you have to use it, since the newer manager versions are giving more freedom, by letting you rename and delete and move files that are already on the player.

[sweetspot]

Interesting. I got the iFP 790 (which I have yet to review), and compared to the iHP 120's UMS transfer speeds, the IMM transfer speed seems MUCH slower. Supposedly, the 790 is a USB 2.0 port, but it seems more like 1.1 speeds. Can't explain why. I'll have to investigate when I do the review.

[tristan]

Current flash based players can't compare to HD based players, because the flash memory simply can't be written to fast enough. I think USB2 flash players are meant to be 3 times faster than USB1.1 players, but still far slower than an iHP120

[wealas]

because the flash memory simply can't be written to fast enough

I don't know about that, I have a USB 2.0 flash drive and I just transfered 185Mb worth of music in 40sec to it, so that makes about 4.6 MB/s (write). My IHP-120 used to transfer 3.9 GB in about 13 minutes (writing) so that is about 5.1 MB/s . Pretty close if you ask me. Maybe iRiver does not use the best of hardware after all? Or maybe it's the software?

[tristan]

I'm happy to stand corrected then wealas. I was pretty sure that I read somewhere about a USB2 flashcard reader that was only 3 or so times faster than USB1.1. Maybe it depends on the memory or other hardware.

[wealas]

Here is a link to a review of my USB flash drive (nifty little thing) that says it goes up to 7 MB/s according to some benchmark. If only the 7xx series could do that in UMS......