Hi Roger,
I'll take a gander at this one, since nobody has answered. (Probably awaiting for somebody to answer with a dumb answer such as me ;-)
;-)
1) Depending on age of platform, BIOS will likely will be using an 8 bit or 16 bit driver, instead of an operating system 32 bit driver and most times quicker and faster, although the BIOS is usually assembly language written and using less resources.
The BIOS can actually use protected mode drivers, but as BIOS USB legacy support usually is only needed for mouse, keyboard and booting, there might be only a simple and slow USB 1.1 compatible driver in the BIOS.
2) The BIOS driver may be emulating a driver, and not a specifically written optimized driver for your device; and/or using a compatibility layer/mode driver for which the USB device recognizes and works with as a fallback method.
The BIOS is the one thing which is extremely optimized for your chipset (mainboard) but USB storage indeed is a generic category. I do not think that more specific USB storage drivers of operating systems are faster because they optimize for a certain brand of USB stick. However, there will not be any cache in the BIOS driver and no parallel I/O queues, so DOS will have to wait again for every single, slow physical USB access.
3) Since USB is usually backwards compatible, and again depending upon age of platform; BIOS and generic USB layer maybe configured only for USB-1 speeds, or if lucky USB-2 speeds, versus having USB-2/USB-3 speeds.
That is what I would also expect to be the problem. You do not need fast USB if most of the time you only need BIOS support to navigate the BIOS setup menu with a keyboard, or boot from USB media a few times per year. I once managed to boot DOS with Windows 3 from USB long time ago. This was VERY slow, as Windows does many small things with many small files. The combination of having no cache and only USB 1.1 made things SLOW.
Also, check your USB cords, as cord length, quality of copper and condition (eg. broken) cords can all significantly affect USB speeds and quality of USB connection.
I do not expect that to be the problem. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
