T61 - Copying to USB HDD = slow laptop!

Hey guys.

Here's a strange issue I'm having, I don't think it's Thinkpad specific, because I have the same issue at home on my Q6600 which also has the Intel 965 chipset. When I copy to a USB HDD, my PC crawls at times. Opening up task manager takes up to 8 seconds on my T61 when this is happening, it's much less of an issue on my Q6600 though, I attribute that to the faster CPU.

This is a fairly clean install, I have hardly any services running on my machine and it's also happened on brand new fresh installs of XP32/64; Vista32/64; Win7x 64.

It happens with any USB disk I plug in.
As mentioned it's non-OS specific.

CPU load dances around 4-10% and kernel times is only about 3%

Symptoms: Opening up applications is painfully slow, notepad took 5 seconds to open. Firefox is much longer.

Running applications, or once apps have opened they are fine.

if I stop the copying, it snaps back to normal.

Copy speed is about 20MB/s to the drive I'm doing now.

I have tried several different disks in different enclosures and multiple cables.

Disk are fine with no bad sectors.

Have tried all 3 of my USB ports, same issue.

No difference between 2.5" bus powered or externally powered 3.5" USB disks.

My disks are not running in PIO mode. (Is that even possible on SATA?)

I can reproduce the issue every time by just copying to the HDD.

Are there tweaks I can use? It seems that this chipset gets overly saturated with IO.

 

I'd like to point out however, this is not a new event, it's happened since I got my notebook and my desktop, it's just only started bothering me again since I do a LOT of backups to USB disks lately.

 

I don't think its entirely the laptop at fault, rather it's the USB interface which is the bottleneck. If the USB HDD seems slow you can try going to the Device Manager, go to the Disk Drives section then Properties and choose "Optimize for Performance" under the Policies tab to see if it makes a difference. Also check "Enable Write Caching" and "Advanced Performance" when the checkboxes appear.

 

The copying speed seems normal for usb 2.0 drive, it might be a tad slower than I expect, overall it fall into my expectation. Maybe you should invest some money in usb 3.0 via expresscard slot.

 

Might need to defrag your drive more often?

 

get an expresscard esata adapter and use esata equipped external drive for backup.

 

Erm, if you read the OP, I'm not complaining about USB copying performance, I'm complaining that during file coping from the internal HDD to a USB drive kills the performance of my PC when opening up applications.

ie: It's as if copying over USB saturates the disk controller and doesn't allow other disk activity when loading up anything from Firefox to Notepad. Copying over Gbit lan and getting 60+MB/s doesn't do this.

So I'm wondering if USB is saturating controller. I'm not worried about USB transfers, those are more than acceptable.

 

This is a common problem with using USB for transferring large data, since the USB 2.0 uses CPU for data transfer, packet handling, buffering, etc. This is also why lot of people used firewire 400 based external hdd drives for backing up large files, since they have a higher sustained file transfer rate and less CPU usage.

 

Exactly.

For everyone that has always said "good riddance" to firewire disappearing from a lot of laptops, those who use it know that CPU usage and sustained throughput are better. The "universal" part of USB is nice, but it has its limitations. eSATA and FireWire are better solutions for regular copying of large files. USB 3.0 is probably better as well, but you need both a controller card, a USB 3.0-compatible cable, and a drive housed in an enclosure that's USB 3.0-certified.

 

this is very common problem. not even related with the machine itself