TI Stellaris USB host speed (MSC)

Ive been looking at using the TI Stellaris implementation of the cortex-M3. The application I am aiming for needs a modest but guaranteed bandwidth to disk. After lots of trawling the web I eventually decided to try Ti support:

Brief description of your request: What data rate can one expect from a stellaris cortex-M3, probably 5000 series into a USB attached hard drive Using the Stellarisware usb libs. Also what is the processor load like in that situation.

Many thanks.

A chap phoned back the following week (!) by which point I had given up on them. He was calling from a really noisy call centre by VOIP. After a very short conversation in which I repeated my question he said “Oh the line is really bad, can I email you.” Firstly that’s not my fault, get a better connection. Secondly, why did this cease to matter when I mentioned the volume that I was planning to use. He said he would pass it up.

Eventually I got a reply:

Thank you for contacting Texas Instruments. Your request has been received and Service Request number ###### has been assigned to your inquiry.

I am sorry for the delay of the response.

Right now we do not have any benchmark for the StellarisWare USB stack.

If you want to do this your self you can try the EK-LM3S3748, here you will have a demo example showing the functionality you want to benchmark. See link for the evaluation kit.
http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-lm3s3748

Please here be aware that the StellarisWare code is not optimized for speed and rewriting the drivers could also improve the speed of the transfer and the device you looked at can run at 80MHz and not 50MHz as the evaluation kit.

Do not hesitate to contact us again if you have any further specific questions.

Kind regards,

[Guy number twos name]
Application Support Engineer
Texas Instruments Deutschland GmbH
European Customer Support Center
http://www-k.ext.ti.com/sc/technical-support/pic/euro.htm

I’m quite sure that this isn’t the guy I spoke to on the phone he is certainly more polite.
I find it quite surprising that TI don’t even have an idea of what it can do. Surely they must test their example code?

Either way pretty unsatisfactory, It of course makes me start thinking of conspiracy theories, is the peripheral really slow and they don’t dare say? It wouldn’t be the first time, see Atmel and the SAM9G USB.

So come on TI, do you fancy sending me a dev board so I can work it out for myself? Lets face it I’m not paying £75 for something that appears to be not upto scratch.