Incredibly slow USB transfers

[Cyker]

Hey all,

I was trying to copy a 15GB archive from a Kingston DT 101 USB stick to my server via my Thinkpad x121e and it took like, 2 hours

Now, at first I was thinking it must be the network, so I tried copying it to the Thinkpad's SSD first - Same deal: Took two hours!

Assumed it was the USB stick, so I plugged it into my Windows 2000 box and copied it across the network to my server - It took 15 minutes!!!!

Just for the sake of completeness, I tried it on my Linux box - Took about 15 minutes too!

Cue my look.

Clearly something isn't right here! I don't know whether it's a problem with my setup, or some fundamental issue with Windows 7 itself, or even the AMD USB hardware in this laptop!

The laptop is running Win7 Pro with 6GB of RAM and an OCZ SSD but other than the extra 2GBs and the SSD it's pretty much stock. Isn't even much in the way of software installed; It's up to date with Windows patches but the only driver updates have been Catalyst drivers!

Has anyone else come across this?

Or, better yet, know of a fix?!

I had a gut feeling that it was some power saving thing that's doing something odd but sitting the laptop in Sod The Kittens And Rainforests mode (All clocks at max, all power saving features fully off, everything at max performance mode etc.) I still get this problem

It seems like it's stuck at transfer speeds around 1-3MB/s while '2k et al hit 10-12MB/s right off the bat!

Edit: Wrong box XD

Edited December 5, 2011 by Cyker

[allen2]

Perhaps your thinkpad is using usb1 mode (10Mb/s), you should be able to check this in the bios (if the option exists) .

[jaclaz]

The 2K drivers are FASTER than new ones, but this applies to FAT32, not to NTFS (and I presume that your 15 Gb archive resides on NTFS):

So it must be something else, I doubt that recent hardware (say last 3 years, even laptops) have USB 1.0 speed, if that laptop came with Windows 7 it must be a recent one....

jaclaz

[Cyker]

It's deffo not USB1 mode; USB1 can't transfer faster than ~900KB/s, certainly not the 1-3MB/s I was seeing.

I'm going to try and pinch a USB DVD drive off a friend and see what happens if I try it using Knoppix; If it's okay, that'll at least eliminate a hardware problem and narrow it down to drivers or Win7 bugs...

(Sadly it appears the x121e CAN'T boot off SD cards despite having a built-in SD card slot )

[jaclaz]

(Sadly it appears the x121e CAN'T boot off SD cards despite having a built-in SD card slot )

HOW is the SD card reader connected (which BUS)?

PLoP may be able to boot from it if it is on the USB bus (it would be a "mixed mode" boot, though)

jaclaz

[Cyker]

Yeah, I was reading up on it and apparently it's one of these rare ones that's wired into the PCIe instead of USB so booting from it is impossible

It doesn't even appear in the BIOS as a bootable option!

[MagicAndre1981]

trace the transfer:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/usbcoreblog/archive/2009/12/21/answering-the-question-what-s-wrong-with-my-device-using-usb-etw.aspx

[jaclaz]

Yeah, I was reading up on it and apparently it's one of these rare ones that's wired into the PCIe instead of USB so booting from it is impossible

It doesn't even appear in the BIOS as a bootable option!

Well, if it is PCIe it may be nonetheless accessible by grub4dos (i.e. the BIOS may map it even if it does not allow it in the list of boot devices).

It would still be a "mixed mode boot", but better than nothing....

An old attempt (UNfinalized ) here:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20314

jaclaz

[Cyker]

Well I can still boot off a suitably setup USB stick or hard disk

Alas Knoppix 6.7.1 doesn't work on this laptop (Doesn't matter if I boot into X or runlevel 2 textmode; It's the Random Dot Stereogram Screen of Doom (Or at least an incompatible graphics driver )

For now it's gone back to the too-lazy-to-fix pile

[Andromeda43]

It's deffo not USB1 mode; USB1 can't transfer faster than ~900KB/s, certainly not the 1-3MB/s I was seeing.

I'm going to try and pinch a USB DVD drive off a friend and see what happens if I try it using Knoppix; If it's okay, that'll at least eliminate a hardware problem and narrow it down to drivers or Win7 bugs...

(Sadly it appears the x121e CAN'T boot off SD cards despite having a built-in SD card slot )

I read that and it struck a note with me.

My Acer One netbook has a lot of capability, but booting from an SD card is NOT one of them, however it boots from a USB stick just fine. So, if I want to boot from a bootable SD card that I made on my main PC, I just put it into a little SD card reader that plugs into a USB port. Voila, booting from the SD card.

The Netbook also does not have a CD/DVD rom drive. but if you connect one via a USB adapter, the CD/DVD drive can boot up the system and write to it.

Just a little more ancient history.... different Flash Drives seem to have different read/write speeds. I have an older 6 gig flash drive that is slower than a floppy disk. I don't even use it, because it's do dang slow.

I've recently bought some "Data Stick Pro" flash drives (8 & 16 gig) from Tiger Direct. They are really fast, compared to some older FD's I have.

Good Luck and Happy Holidays!

B)

Edited December 7, 2011 by Andromeda43

[dencorso]

You might use MS USBVIEW to positively ascertain whether the device has connected as USB 2.0, 1.1 or 1.0.

[Cyker]

Actually a good trick for that is just goto Device Manager and View Devices by Connection and then drill down to the USB controllers to find your device.

If it's connected to an Enhanced Controller then it's USB2, but if it's on an Open or Universal (OHCI or UHCI) controller then its USB1

Another sure way to tell is if the device can transfer faster than ~1MB/s, it's deffo USB2 as USB1 can't transfer faster than that. (Usually it tops out closer to 900KB/s!)