usb-imagewriter is excessively slow

[Neil Mayhew]

Binary package hint: usb-imagewriter

The reason is that it gives dd too small a buffer size. Using bs=1M makes it go much faster. Other sizes may be even better.

Ubuntu 10.10
usb-imagewriter 0.1.3-0ubuntu4

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Oliver - I noticed this bug had a patch and thought you might be interested in it.

[Neil Mayhew (neil.mayhew)]

Thanks, Brian.

I saw in some manual dd instructions on LP somewhere that bs=4M was being recommended, so this might be even better than the bs=1M in the patch.

I have also posted an (unrelated) patch for the win32 equivalent of this application (https://bugs.launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+bug/724102).

[Neil Mayhew (neil.mayhew)]

I would have rated this a good bit higher than "wishlist". It really is unusable at the moment. It takes hours when it should take minutes.

The patch is quite trivial. Any chance it could be integrated soon? I want to recommend this utility to the users of the SD-based remix I'm distributing, but have to tell them to use dd instead as the utility is unusable.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

i will make sure the fix is in before final oneiric release

[Neil Mayhew (neil.mayhew)]

Great! Thanks, Oliver.

Once it's been accepted into the Oneiric package, I'd like to do an SRU request for Lucid, since a number of my users prefer LTS. I've done an SRU before, so I think I'll be able to handle this once it's in Oneiric.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package usb-imagewriter - 0.1.3-0ubuntu5

---------------
usb-imagewriter (0.1.3-0ubuntu5) oneiric; urgency=low

  * switch from 1K to 1M blocksize to speed up the data transfer, thanks to
    Neil Mayhew <email address hidden> for the fix (LP: #790981)
 -- Oliver Grawert <email address hidden> Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:11:27 +0200