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HP Pavilion ZE2308wm, slow USB port

post #1 of 6
10/11/06 at 5:28pm
Thread Starter 
I just started using an external HDD and I noticed that transfer speed tops out at ~8MB/s. It's clearly faster than USB1.1 speed, but its nowhere near the speed I'm getting from the same external drive hooked up to my desktop, which yields 25-30MB/s

The test was made using a program HD Tach.

Why is my USB port so slow?
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post #2 of 6
10/12/06 at 5:26am
usb actual data transfer rate is dependent on ur system's processor speed, the usb port (and/or hub) and most important, the speed of the devices being accessed.

can u get more info from ur test tprogram (hdd access rate, buffer ...)?

cheers ...
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post #3 of 6
10/12/06 at 8:14am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by qhn
usb actual data transfer rate is dependent on ur system's processor speed, the usb port (and/or hub) and most important, the speed of the devices being accessed.

can u get more info from ur test tprogram (hdd access rate, buffer ...)?

cheers ...

HD Tach is the program...
My external drive's a Western Digital 7200RPM. Hook up the samething to my desktop, test it w/ same program, I get 25MB/s. Hook it up to this laptop, I get 8MB/s...
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post #4 of 6
10/12/06 at 11:11am
u looked at the average read, what with random access and cpu usage on both machines?
what access mode (pio, dma ...) do u have on pc and laptop?

cheers ...
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post #5 of 6
10/12/06 at 3:39pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by qhn
u looked at the average read, what with random access and cpu usage on both machines?
what access mode (pio, dma ...) do u have on pc and laptop?

cheers ...

The access mode shoudln't be relevant to USB. Here's the result. This laptop does this with every external HDD, so I'm pretty sure its the USB port that's slow.

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post #6 of 6
10/12/06 at 4:01pm
One possibility for the slowdown is that Write caching is disabled by default for USB devices. Try going into Device Manager -> Disk Drives -> your Disk and change the Policies to enable write cacheing (Optimize for Performance) and see if that helps. (Just remember to not physically disconnect the drive without telling WinXP about it)

Now that I think about it, your problem is Read speed so this probably won't help. Other than this, I would have to guess that the machines PCI bus is overloaded with too many devices sharing the same bus. Not easy to decipher, and absoluteley nothing you can do about it if this is the case.
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