Organelle USB stick acting out?

Hey All,
Since day one of using this amazing blue device I have been consistently experiencing, that my 2010 Macbook Pro (running Mavericks, if that matters…) finds it very difficult to work with the stock USB stick. It’s recognized fast enough by the laptop, but deleting from and copying files to it take way too long (like a minute or so for a … say… 60 kb patch…) and ejecting may take forever, so more often than not I opt for force eject. Out of the many different sizes, types of USB sticks and external drives I’ve been regularly using with the same MB, the Organelle stick is the only one acting out as described. Every other piece works fast and fine. Anyone else have similar stories? Is it the stick, my laptop and the stick, or maybe the file structure/formatting used on it? Not that I can’t live with this, am just wondering if I’m the only one facing this. Thanks!

Fought mine for an hr or so yesterday before it worked correctly…completely unrecognized by my laptop when normally everything works flawlessly. Tested on my pc too and had issues even though it showed up right away (just couldn’t transfer files initially).

Planning to ditch it entirely and use an sd card instead

Yea mines been a little bastid recently but mostly cool, never used an alternative so can’t compare. I think the fact that i ram it in and out of the USB slots on my organelle and laptop a few times daily can’t help. Maybs time for a new one, I can’t bring myself to plug a reg usb stick into my vital organ so might have to order another lil white baby usb soon.

same issues here since i bought it @jooga1972. i’m on a 2012 Macbook Pro running 10.10.5.

Thanks for the feedback guys, will try another stick with the Organelle. It accepts 8 gb devices, right?

I ended up getting a 32gb small format samsung USB drive and it’s been working really well.

That is good to know such a large drive works. 32Gb wow that is like 50 hrs of .wav files.

Generally any old thumb drive should work, but you want to make sure it is formatted with at FAT filesystem.

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Thanks for all the feedback, now copying patches and all onto the new stick.

Yes, from the start, my stick also takes a while to mount, upload/delete patches and eject. I’ll maybe invest in a new stick.

After a couple of days using another (brand new) USB stick, I guess it is safe to say that the stock drive is as good (and slow) as any other; initially the replacement stick was super fast, then as more and more files got copied to it, overall ‘performance’ decreased and now, with nearly 200 patches on board, the new drive is behaving exactly as the original one; mounts OK, file management is a lengthy process, ejecting takes super long or never happens. So I’m back to square one which is not a complaint, just saying. :slight_smile:

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Same here. Perhaps the next organelle will give usb 3.0 but that’s reall more dependent on raspi than organelle

hmm, if performance is deteriorating, then I suspect its not USB speed…its more likely to be the filesystem… the fat filesystem while useful for its compatibility is not great at dealing with large directory structures.

are you using 2.2? have you tried putting patches in subdirectories?

the way forward, I think, is for us to move to using the internal SD card for storage/access and then use the usb stick (or wifi) merely to transfer new patch/samples.
not only will this provide speed improvements, but it will also mean that in general use , a usb port is freed up for other use (wifi, other midi devices)

this is what I’m already doing… and it works fine, I just need to ‘package’ it up for a few organelle OS release.

as for organelle 2.0, I think internal wifi is the way forward (with sdcard for storage), this would wifi could be the ‘standard’ way to transfer files.

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Yep, I’m on the latest OS but am yet to deal with subdirectories. Have no performance issues though when the stick is in the Organelle - patches load and work fine. It’s deleting/copying files to/from the stick with the laptop that is a pretty long process and the more patches/files you have on the stick the longer it takes, whatever is going on. That’s what I see. This may be down to my old Macbook too and like I said the slow file management is by no means a show-killer, it’s just a little annoying but I can live with that. And hey, in a way this is all your ‘fault’ guys: you keep on coding these awesome new patches on a regular basis and this leads to extensive ‘copy new patches’ type of chores. :slight_smile: Just kidding of course, god bless you all for making these new patches, workflows, etc. happen.
The SD card-based storage sounds like the way to go. Speaking of which (and the Organelle 2): is there a new hw revision coming maybe?

then its your laptop … :wink:
assuming its a usb 2.0 stick , check your inserting into a port which supports 2.0, some of the ports might be 1.0/1.1 (in mac terms they call it superspeed/hispeed as well), or alternatively just try different usb ports on your mac.

be careful when using usb hubs especially if the devices is 1.x they can be slow if you are using multiple 1.x devices… so if your are using a hub, trying using without to see if its quicker.

for newer machines, you can use usb 3.0 sticks, these fly like the wind, you wont get the extra performance on the organelle, but it’ll improve the write time on the pc/mac, which is always slower then read times… anyway, much faster when transferring files.

oh… and if you ever don’t shutdown your organelle properly, your usb stick will be marked as ‘potentially dirty’… this throws ‘warnings’ on the organelle, I don’t know if this slows down mounting. this is a bit of a pain to clear for end users … you need to use the command line, easier to format it again :wink:

I hope not, just got mine… and still far from maximising its potential :slight_smile:

Yep, the stick is 2.0 and so are both ports on my MB. They are identical and I see no difference in their performance. Anyways, getting a new(er) computer has been on the agenda for some time and that’ll happen eventually.
Thanks for all the info Mark.

The disks do go pretty slow on my Mac too. But I think it is a filesystem problem like mentioned, especially if it slows down with more stuff on it. The raw read-write speeds are actually pretty good, I wonder if another filesystem could work on it? I know ext doesn’t work on Mac so I never tried, but maybe something else …

ExFat if your not using it already… Ive not test with organelle ( i dont use the usb drive much :wink: ) but linux, mac and windows support… not sure it will get you more than a small % but worth testing.
also Id try putting things in sub folders.

oh, and finder is a pretty slow way to copy files, better to do from the command line if you have a large number to copy.

EDIT: ok, so i tried exfat…
Organelle doesnt have installed exfat, but this can be installed via pacman.
then the mount script needs adjusting… (I’ll check this into my firmware just in case we decide to move forward)
bizarrely mother was still not seeing patches, which was odd, since the root user had no issues accessing the files… so if this is of interest, I will need to write some code to see exactly which bit of the mother code is not seeing the patches… probably something fairly trivial.