M17X-R3 USB Speeds Suddenly Too Slow

Hi Everybody,

I've had my new alienware m17x r3 since march 2012 and It's been great up to 5 days ago. About that time, I saw that copying a file to a sandisk cruzer 32 GB was taking way too long. Usually, this task was accomplished in the past in roughly 10-15 seconds for a 700 MB file. But that day, the file transfer started great and showed a transfer speed of over 9 MB/s and the progress bar went right up till the end and stopped a few pixels short of completion. It then remained stuck there for about 2 minutes after which I thought something was wrong and tried to cancel the operation.

After getting stuck in cancelling for roughly 3 minutes, I just pulled out the flash drive and thought everything would be fine. Alas! it was not to be so. Since that fateful day, something odd has happened to the USB file transfer speeds on my system. For some reason, the file transfer dialog shows outrageously fast speeds like 105 MB/s or 145 MB/s and the progress bar races ahead and get's stuck at the end and refuses to budge. This happens for all files bigger than say, 100MB or so.

It is also the same case when transferring to a USB HDD and even when it was plugged into the USB 3.0 Ports on the left side. To top it off, I tried it with a USB 3.0 HDD plugged into the USB 3.0 port and while it did show a more believable transfer speed, ~75-80MB/s, the progress bar got stuck at the end and finally completed the process after roughly 3 minutes! for a 700MB file!

I also noticed something different: previously, when I copied even huge files ~8-9GB within the system's internal hard disk, i.e. copying from one partition to another or to different folders on the same partition, the files used to get copied instantly, and I mean INSTANTLY! like no progress bar or file copy dialog whatsoever! Now, the same files take like 2-3 minutes.

I must add that I have McAfee Antivirus and regularly scan and keep the whole rig secure. I wanted Kaspersky but alienware shipped the system with McAfee.

So what's going on and what's causing these painfully slow transfer speeds? The same cruzer 32 GB transferred 800MB in 3 files in less than 25 seconds today on another system.

Please help me guys, I'm running out of ideas here.

Config (essentials):

M17X-R3 Core i7 2760QM (2.4 GHz)
16GB 1600 RAM
GTX 580M with Nvidia 3D Vision

Thanks for taking the time to read to the end of my long and sorry tale.

 

Have not encountered this problem myself, but you could try reinstalling the NEC USB 3.0 driver ( Drivers and Downloads | Dell [United States] and the Cougar Point chipset drivers ( Drivers and Downloads | Dell [United States]. However, since the problem is occurring even on internal transfers, it sounds like a disk or disk controller issue or possibly a file I/O issue. Try running the POST diagnostics utility (F12 at the boot screen and select Diagnostics) to see whether a you have a disk hardware problem. If no problem is found, try installing the most recent Intel RST drivers. http://www.dell.com/support/drivers...ctCode=alienware-m17x-r3&urlProductCode=False. There are newer versions of the IRST available, but the Dell version is stable and should be adequate for this purpose. If none of that works, try running System File Check (SFC /scannow from an elevated command prompt) and Disk Check (Start>Computer>Right click c: drive and select Properties>Tools>in Error Checking section, Check Now>Start>Schedule Disk Check, etc. It will run when you restart Windows. If all that fails, you might consider a clean install of Windows. Good luck.