MSI 1029 - external USB hard drives seem slow

Hello,

I'm not sure if this should go here or in the upgrade section, but I think it is a problem with my laptop.

I have an MSI 1029 laptop running 64 bit Windows XP. It seems like the transfer rate is really slow to and from my external USB drives. I also have a hub plugged into my computer into which my mouse and keyboard are plugged into, but my hard drives are plugged directly into my computer.

I ran HD Tach and it reported both of my USB hard drives transferring data at about 5-8 MB/s. This seems really slow for USB 2.0. I tested the drives with both plugged in and each separately, just in case they were sharing bandwidth.

I also ran Sisoft SANDRA Lite and it reported that my USB ports are 2.0 and running at Hi Speed (480 Mbits), so I can't tell why I am getting such slow throughput.

Does anyone else have any idea why my hard drives are transferring so slowly, and what I can do to correct it? BTW, One drive is a Maxtor Onetouch external with firewire and USB 2.0 connections, the other is a Seagate internal SATA drive that I placed in an external enclosure that has USB 2.0 and eSATA connections. I am using the USB cables that came with the devices and they claimed to be USB 2.0 cables.

I can move the maxtor to the firewire port to work around the problem, but I would rather fix my USB throughput if possible. I'm also thinking about getting a PCMIA card to add eSATA to my laptop for my other drive. Will I have problems with finding 64 bit drivers for the few PCMCIA eSATA cards I see on the net?

--Brandon Young

 

Not certain, but there is a driver from Microsoft for reading drives from 32 bit to 64 bit OS's, perhaps thats faulty or sub optimal. Tried a google search?

Also, are those drives NTFS or FAT?

 

Have you tried putting the drives in another computer? Could it be that the drive's USB capabilities are only USB1.1, so it doesn't matter that your computer's ports are USB2.0? (USB2.0 ports are backwards compatible...)

 

Well, the maxtor drive and the drive enclosure are both advertised as USB 2.0. I find it hard to believe that they would both be advertised as 2.0, but be 1.1.


I plugged the drives into another computer, tested, and and I rebooted my laptop and tested on that again. Now HD tach is reporting a speed of around 15 MB/s for both computers. An improvement, but it still seems slow compared to the theoretical maximum for USB 2.0.

The drives are formatted as NTFS.

--Brandon Young

 

that is the problem with usb 2.0. sure it has a high max speed, but the speed fluctuates, and you never get that max speed. this is why many prefer firewire b/c the transfer rate is more stable.

 

Ejl has a point. While USB2 has a theoretical peak throughput of 480Mb/s, for sustained transfers the speed is probably closer to 200-250Mb/s, depending on the USB chipset being used (at both ends).

Divide that by 10 as you usually would for a serial connection, rather than 8 (allow for protocol overhead please ) gives you a sustained transfer speed of 20-25MB/s... this is as fast as you'll ever see from an external USB drive.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd suspect a background process was simultaneously trying to access the drives, slowing throughput. I'm think either a virus scanner or Windows System Restore tool.

Either that, or WinXP does have the occasional habit of self borking it's USB drivers.

+1 for Firewire drives. The theoretical peak transfer is slower, but it's actual sustained speed is usually a lot better.

 

I have to agree with TedJ and vote for Firewire here.
Lets not forget that just about everything you touch on your computer is now routed through the USBus. So your touchpad/mouse, keyboard, and the card reader (if yours works.) use USB, let alone that XP maintains a 15% reserve for system use.

When I plug the same drive/enclosure combo into my 1029, in both USB and Firewire, Firewire runs about 50%