I'm running VirtualBox 3.1.x and am experiencing extreme slowness on attached USB devices. I've posted elsewhere but haven't gotten any responses.

I found that running Ubuntu as the host, both x86 and x64, I get about 500kb/s on USB drives attached to a guest. Also, I recently rebuilt the host as Fedora 12, both x86 and x64, in both cases I'm getting about 5-6MB/s at best. Not bad, but not great.

If I mount the USB drives on the host I get 20-30MB/s transfer rate.

**** Update 01.01.10
I built a host running Vista and the performance is quite a bit faster, in the realm of 8-10MB/s, which is what I would expect. So, it appears somehow the various Linux distrubtions I've tried vary in speed for some unknown reason.
********************

Anyone have thoughts on something on the host that could be throttling VirtualBox?

hi

Could you give a little more information on exactly how you partitioned the usb?

What is the lsusb ids?

What format are you using...and if journalised, how long between access before system checks? (either in time or bootups)

Do you notice this slowness for certain types of files?

Do you notice this slowness for certain sizes of files?

2) You are aware, if you are using non-free ose, it would be faster to use shared folders?

The drives are all NTFS, single partition.

Not sure if this applies in this case, they were newly formatted when the machine was built.

Happens for all file types and sizes, the transfer rate is very consistent.

This is an excellent point! I may end up going that route instead at a later time. However, I'm still really curious as to the current issue.

hi

I refuse to format to ntfs but it is journalised. Maybe your linux needs ntfs-3g module autoloaded?

2) Now that we have established the speed is slow for all things....try reformatting as ext3 (even if you need it on a ms...in which case partition it so its
ms.......format ntfs
linux....format ext3

put files onto ext3 and retest.

linux should have less trouble with its own format?

2) yep if you need speed shared folders is your anwser.....so no need to try or reply.

happy 2010

Well, I'm very sad to say that I've switched back to VMWare Server 2.0 for these specific guests. I'm getting the speeds I expect and I can use truecrypt to system favorite encrypt and mount the drives with no issues. I'll just stick with that until VirtualBox gets their code cleaned up.

Thanks again to aus9 for all the feedback!