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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

Now I just have to contrive the circumstances where this is useful to me. :)

I don't know about the Ethernet part but it bothers me that even wifi has become faster than the wired USB port on our phones.

All I want to do is copy over all the photos and videos from my phone to my computer but I have to baby sit the process and think whether I want to skip or retry a failed copy. And it is so slow. USB 2.0 slow. I guess everybody has given up on the idea of saving their photos and videos over USB?

> USB 2.0 slow

Many phones indeed only support USB 2.0. For example the base iPhone 17. The Pro does support USB 3.2, however.

> I guess everybody has given up on the idea of saving their photos and videos over USB?

Correct.

Why don't you get a phone with 3.0+ USB?

My last two phones in the last 4 years had at least USB 3.1

Wifi is fast but the latency is terrible and the reliability is even worse. It can go up and down like a yo-yo. USB is far more predictable even if it is a bit slower.

I have a cluster of 4 RPi Zero Ws and network reliability is not great. Since it is for the chaos, it’s fine, but it’s very common to have a node be offline at any given time.

Even worse, the control plane is exposed, but for something that runs 3 Hercules mainframe emulation and two Altairs with MP/M, it’s fine.

I have a bunch of HA wifi connected sensors, I see them drop off and reconnect all the time it is most annoying.

Not sure why this happens to you. I have HA with several dozens WiFi devices and I have only 2 devices (one relay, one sensor) that disconnect regularly, they have both poor WiFi signal, one in a basement and one far from the AP. Almost all are on 2.4 GHz, not by choice, but they work well.

> but I have to baby sit the process and think whether I want to skip or retry a failed copy

Do you import originals or do you have the "most compatible" setting turned on?

I always assumed apple simply hated people that use windows/linux desktops so the occasional broken file was caused by the driver being sort-of working and if people complain, well, they can fuck off and pay for icloud or a mac. After upgrading to 15 pro which has 10 gbps usb-c it still took forever to import photos and the occasional broken photos kept happening, and after some research it turns out that the speed was limited by the phone converting the .heic originals into .jpg when transferring to a desktop. Not only does it limit the speed, it also degrades the quality of the photos and deletes a bunch of metadata.

After changing the setting to export original files the transfer is much faster and I haven’t had a single broken file / video. The files are also higher quality and lower filesize, although .heic is fairly computationally-demanding.

Idk about Android but I suspect it might have a similar behavior

> given up on the idea of saving their photos and videos over USB?

Until USB has monthly service business to compete with cloud storage revenue.

I feel like this is an artifact from the late 2010s when the talk was of removing the port completely from phones, where that was being touted alongside swapping speakers with haptic screen audio as a way to make them completely waterproof.

As wireless charging never quite reached the level hoped – see AirPower – and Google/Apple seemingly bought and never did anything with a bunch of haptic audio startups, I figure that idea died....but they never cared enough to make sure the USB port remained top end.

I'd usually be against losing ports and user serviceable stuff but if the device could actually be properly sealed up (ie no speakers, mics, charge ports, etc) that would be legitimately useful.

If the photos on the phone are visible as files on a mounted filesystem, you can use rsync to copy them. If the connection drops but recovers by itself, you can put rsync inside a while true loop until it’s doing nothing.

I’m using Dropbox for syncing photos from phone to Linux laptop, and mounting the SDcard locally for cameras, so this is a guess.

Wouldn’t this be useful for clustering Macs over TB5? Wasn’t the maximum bandwidth over USB-cables 5Gbps? With a switch, you could cluster more than just 4 Mac Studios and have a couple terabytes for very large models to work with.

I was hoping somebody would suggest that (and eventually try it out).

With TB5, and deep pockets, you might probably also benchmark it against a setup with dedicated TB5 enclosures (e.g., Mercury Helios 5S).

TB5 has PCIe 4.0 x4 instead of PCIe 3.0 x4 -- that should give you 50 GbE half-duplex instead of 25 GbE. You would need a different network card though (ConnectX-5, for example).

Pragmatically though, you could also aggregate (bond) multiple 25 GbE network card ports (with Mac Studio, you have up to 6 Thunderbolt buses, so more than enough to saturate a 100GbE connection).

Too bad Jeff Geerling returned his Mac Studios to Apple. Would be lovely to see how 5x faster RDMA impacts the performance.

25 Gbps isn't all that much. It would be good, but would be below the 40+ Gbps I was getting on the TB5 ring network.

I think where it would show more significant speed up is on the AMD Strix Halo cluster.

Except I haven't been able to get RDMA over Thunderbolt on there to work, so it'd be apples to oranges comparing ConnectX to Thunderbolt on Linux.

Oddly enough, that’s exactly what I’ve been benchmarking - different ways of linking Strix Halo machines - with respect to throughput & latency.

Posted a little bit re: the TB side of things on the Framework and Level1Techs forums but haven’t pulled everything together yet because the higher-speed Ethernet and Infiniband data is still being collected.

So far my observations re: TB is that, on Strix Halo specifically, while latency can be excellent there seem to be some limits on throughput. My tests cap out at ~11Gbps unidir (Tx|Rx), ~22Gbps bidi (Tx+Rx). Which is wierd because the USB4 ports are advertised at 40Gbps bidi, the links report as 2x20Gbs, and are stable with no errors/flapping - so not a cabling problem.

The issue seems rather specific to TB networking on Strix Halo using the USB4 links between machines.

Emphasis to exclude common exceptions - other platforms eg Intel users getting well over 20Gbps; other mini PCs eg MS-1 Max USB4v2; local network eg I’ve measured loopback >100Gbps; or external storage where folk are seeing 18Gbps+ / numbers that align with their devices.

Emd goal is to get hard data on all reasonably achievable link types. Already have data on TB & lower-speed Ethernet (switched & P2P), currently doing setup & tuning on some Mellanox cards to collect data for higher-speed Ethernet and IB. P2P-only for now; 100GbE switching is becoming mainstream but IB switches are still rather nutty.

Happy to collaborate with any other folk interested in this topic. Reach out to (username at pm dot me).

I recently did a complete disk backup/clone which only took 15 minutes instead of hours. Maxed the SSD which was being backed up at about 2.5GB/s.

rsync...grsync...a solution for broken partial batch transfers since forever

Remote Time Machine backups are snappier than ever before :)

Pretty much anywhere you have networked storage? Gigabit is about on-par with pre-sata ATA133.

Would be useful if I had to debug my internet link and I only had a laptop.

It also works on iPad Pro :)

Porn?

What kind of porn requires 25 gigabits ?

A lot of porn.

As a guess, large-scale volumetric or photogrammetric "datasets" could be difficult to stream over lesser interconnects.

Mind-blowing 3D stereoscopic 480 FPS with 11.2 audio channels with 768 kbps rate and spatial sound stage :D

Uncompressed 8k ones

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