Slow transfer speeds from USB disk

[Sam Morris]

When converting a physical machine into a VirtualBox guest, I attached a USB external hard disk to the host computer, and connected it to the guest. Then I started to transfer data from the disk to the guest.

I noticed that the data was only being transferred at about 1.1 MB/sec. Perhaps co-incidentally, this is the speed of a USB 1.1 hub. I checked the kernel logs and saw that the device was being attached to an EHCI controller, and was being configured to run in high speed mode, so I'm not sure what to try next...

[chris]

happening here as well. VB 3.0.0 XP sp3 host XP sp2 guest USB 2.0 EHCI enabled

very slow transfer speeds.

[Domino]

Same problem. Host = Ubuntu9.04 AMD64, guest = Windows 2003 R2 Ent. SP1 Vbox 2.2.4. Does anybody solve this problem?

[[email protected]]

I think I'm having the same problem. VB3.0.4 on Ubuntu 32-bit host, Windows XP 32-bit guest. USB1.1 speeds...

[jptech]

I have the same problem. VB 3.0.4, Win7 64bit host, Ubuntu 9.04 i386 guest. Looks the same as #2973. I've used VirtualBox since 2.2 and have never seen decent USB performance.

[David Harvey]

Is there a resolution for this?

I'm using vbox 3.1.2 r56127 on Ubuntu 9.10 hosting a Windows XP SP3 system. I'm running iTunes in the Windows XP instance.

I'm on a USB2.0 system. It takes approximately seven hours to sync my 16GB IPhone.

With a native Windows XP system, also running USB 2.0 it takes less than 20 minutes.

david@kahuna:~/.VirtualBox/Machines/WindowsXP/Logs$ uname -a Linux kahuna 2.6.31-17-generic #54-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 10 16:20:31 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

I've attached lsusb -v output and the vbox.log.

[David Harvey]

lsusb -v output

[David Harvey]

davidharvey-kahuna-vbox.log

[Tony Plack]

Same problem here. I hope they fix this issue. I am only seeing ~600kB/s transfer across large reads. Native, I am getting 16MB/s with the same drive on the host.

[John Ferlito]

Is there any chance of this bug being looked at? I'm able to assist in anyway possible. I'm seeing a very similar issue with a Digital Camera. It shows about 3 frames per second where normally it would do a normal 24 or so. I believe this is a similar issue to the USB drive performance.

I believe this ticket is probably also related to #2973

[bla0ck]

This is still the issue for 4.0.4 macos host, debian guest. I get 1.7-2 Megabytes per second while copying data between two attached usb drives and around 5-6 MBps while writing data to the attached usb drive only.

Transferring files on physical machine gives 30 Megabytes per second speeds.

PS let me know whats the point in having public bugzilla with no feedback from VB team? What the point in having corporate users pay for such a pathetic USB performance? Bother not to answer, 10x.

[Frank Mehnert]

The USB emulation is still not optimal but we are working on improving the code. Yelling from non-paying users will only result in frustration of the developers. And in general, functional bugs (crashes, host reboots, device malfunctions) have a higher priority than performance optimizations.

[nars]

I do get same problem with VirtualBox 3.2.4 on kernel 3.4.11 (unRAID), with USB 2.0 EHCI option enabled on the VM settings it's actually slower than with the option disabled!

Tried with an external HDD and with a pen drive (both can read at near 30MB/s on the host system), with USB 2.0 EHCI enabled I can only read them at around 0.5MB/s with USB 2.0 EHCI disabled I can get near 3MB/s :(

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

I can confirm this issue on a Linux host.

Direct USB2 flash drive read speed under Linux is approximately 30MB/sec, while in VirtualBox 4.3.16 I only get 6MB/sec.

Linux kernel: 3.16.2 i686 PAE, 16GB RAM.

[Mihai Hanor]

I have tested this in the recent past, there are no changes in the current/past behavior. I have just tested VirtualBox 4.3.21.97058 (ext. pack 4.3.21.97013) with an USB2.0 disk drive and a 100Mbps USB2.0 Fast Ethernet adapter. The speeds are pretty low. I got a constant ~4.5MBytes/s with the portable HDD (compared to a constant ~31MBytes/s on the host). Using the Ethernet adapter (which maxes out on the host) usually get a relatively constant speed below 20Mbps on download. The upload is better, but the transfer hangs at some point, while the network becomes unusable and I have to reboot/reset the guest. The VM process sometimes hangs/crashes during this stage, while I try to recover the session. The CPU usage on the guest is very low and it's relatively low on the host (per CPU core). Host: Windows 8.1 x64

[Klaus Espenlaub]

VirtualBox 4.3.14 has some USB performance improvements. Nothing earth shattering, but we've heard of 50-100% increased USB MSD transfer rate. Virtualizing USB 1/2 controllers is insanely expensive, which explains why the transfer rates are so low. It's mostly related to latency (which MSDs directly translate into low throughput), not to high CPU usage. We tried trading in CPU usage for better latency, without much luck, which is why only USB3 will bring a huge boost (only with guest OSes supporting it).

[aeichner]

I think this can be closed, xHCI is available for quite some time now in VirtualBox and we don't plan on improving the throughput when EHCI is used because the effort to do this is not justifiable looking at what we might be able to achieve. With the current state I'm able to get 10MB/s sequential read speed from a USB flash drive.