1/10 of full speed

Hi,
I've upgrade my laptop to Vista Business, and hook up my external enclosure HDD.
I never notice the speed when using it in XP, but I could not help in Vista.
It said the speed is about 6-7MB/s where as a full support speed for the enclosure is 480Mbps.

Any idea?

My enclosure is a Vantec one with SATA HDD inside.

 

Well, here's some info...

Even though the spec is for 480Mbit/s, you only get about 320Mbit/s in real life. But that is 320Mbit/s per USB controller, which may or may not have multiple ports on it. So if you have a laptop with 4 ports, you could have anywhere between 1-4 controllers. So bandwidth will be equally split between the connected USB ports no matter what...it isn't dynamic. And then it gets worse when you have an external hub, because each port will only get a fraction of the real bandwidth...and I've never seen a hub that does dynamic bandwidth sharing. But they might exist.

Vista might be slowing it down a little with what I believe is a few NTFS upgrades, but my guess is that you have it attached to a hub, or it is a 2.5" HDD and you are running it to an unpowered hub. That's bad. Right now I have the same issue, but I get about 12MB/s per drive...at least until I move my cords around the optimize the bandwidth sharing available.

Do you still have XP installed? Run HDTune in both OSes and see how similar the results are. There could be a Vista specific issue, but I don't know at this point.

I've been dealing with a similar bandwidth issue on my nc8430, so HPs given me a few 'real life' specs.

 

I just have a wireless mouse and this 3.5inch HDD in an enclosure hook up in 2 USB ports; still one port left.

 

Make sure you have set the policy for the HDD set to "Optimise for best performance".

John