Windows 98SE - USB 2.0 Question

[Monroe]

OK, I am back with some USB observations and questions. Yesterday and early today I had those "fast" USB transfer speeds occur again. This time I was ready to actually see how it happened. This is of course with my Thinkpad Windows 98SE computer. I have several USB 2.0 flash drives ... I also have a Seagate 500 GB USB drive ... I changed it to FAT32 after I bought it and never really used it much until last month (March). Yesterday, I noticed that I really do have very fast USB transfer speeds using that drive ... but when I go to a regular USB stick flash drive, the speeds are much slower. I can transfer a large file in 45 seconds with the Seagate drive but if I use a flash drive, the same file will take 4 or 5 minutes. In my last post I remembered that some of my files had transferred very fast and some very slow ... but I didn't know it was the Seagate drive till yesterday ... hadn't used it since March.

So my USB ports are OK after all ... I do have fast USB transfer rates, just not with a small flash drive. So I am wondering why the fast transfer rates with the 500 GB Seagate drive and the slower speeds with all my newer flash drives? The Seagate is not a slim version drive ... it has a power adapter and a moving drive inside.

I figured all the guys, on this forum, who understand USB better than myself, could explain why the difference. What's different in that Seagate USB drive over the smaller flash drives? ... I have USB 2.0 flash drives up to 16 GB.

[jaclaz]

I figured all the guys, on this forum, who understand USB better than myself, could explain why the difference. What's different in that Seagate USB drive over the smaller flash drives? ... I have USB 2.0 flash drives up to 16 GB.

The difference you report sounds a bit too much , but of course if you use a hard disk the bottle neck is the USB bus, while if you use a USB stick, the actual stick itself is likely to be the bottleneck.

"Normally" you would probably have on a "fast" USB stick anything between 12 and 24, and on a hard disk anything between 25 and 40 MB/s.

Compare:

http://reboot.pro/9347/

jaclaz

[Monroe]

Well, I transferred about 15 files and they were showing 45 seconds when I use the Seagate drive, I did about 5 or 6 separately and then did 4 at a time, still fast ... I went by the time shown in the little box and afterwards I hooked up a stick flash drive and transferred one file, it took around 4 to 5 minutes which is usually always the time I see using the small flash drives. I will be using the Seagate drive for these larger files from now on ... it was taking me an hour or more to transfer files, now it's just a matter of minutes ... so it's a bottleneck on the stick drives. These files that take only 45 seconds to transfer are around 700 MB size. It's crazy watching how fast they transfer to that Seagate drive ... when I use a flash stick, I can usually go and do other things while the minutes tick away.

Edited April 27, 2012 by duffy98

[dencorso]

Well, there are pendrives, and then... there are pendrives. You usually get what you pay for.

Note: USB 2.1 mode is when a USB 3.0 device is in USB 2.0 compatibility mode.

Pen Drive Performance Tests 3.pdf

[jaclaz]

I went by the time shown in the little box

That's not in the least accurate.

BTW that also takes into account the drive cache, you can have something similar using one of theose "turboUSB" enabled sticks.

What is seemingly "way too much" is the slowness of the stick (which I find "exceptional") 700/240=~3 Mb/s.

The speed of the disk 700/45=~16 Mb/s is anyway at the very low end of "common" speeds.

Why don't you benchmark with Atto ir Crystal Mark (cannot say if either can run on W98, but probably Atto, which is around since the dawn of time, can)

jaclaz

[dencorso]

CrystalDiskMark22_9x

[Monroe]

Yes jaclaz, I understand that the "time" shown in that little box is not 100% ... I was going to add that in that last post but I just figured it's more of an approximate time. Anyway, I'm not here to disagree over a few seconds ... OK, let's say the time is between 45 and 50 seconds, no matter ... I know what I am seeing ... those transfers are going under a minute to that Seagate drive ... I will also say that a transfer using a stick flash drive is probably closer to 4 minutes, maybe a few seconds here and there. I said 4 to 5 minutes earlier.

dencorso ... you mention USB 3.0 but I don't remember that on the box when I bought the drive. I was looking around last night to see if I could find that drive for sale or some old ads, but all the drives that I found are USB powered, this has a plug in adapter but it looks like the USB powered ones. I remember that it came formatted as NTFS and with Free Agent ... wasn't listed to work with Win 98. I found a little free program by another drive company that would convert the drive to FAT32. I posted about that little program here at this forum, in case others might be interested, early 2010 or late 2009 I think. I also got rid of Free Agent to free up all the drive space. Many others seemed to be wanting to do the same thing when I was searching around. Anyway, I don't need to check the transfer speed to the exact seconds, the speed is there just for that one USB drive ... just hope the drive stays healthy. After I bought the Seagate, I started reading about people complaining about Seagate USB drives and that they were defective ... started making clicking sounds and failing after 200 or 300 MB of files. Those may have been larger 1.5 TB drives, not sure ... mine is only 500 GB.

I thought I should post all this concerning Windows 98 ... maybe someone has one of these drives sitting around and can test it out to see if they also have faster transfer speeds.

[dencorso]

There are no drivers for USB 3.0 for Win 9x/ME that I know of. There is a USB 3.0 PCI (not PCI-e) card available: StarTech PCIUSB3S2, which, of course, limit maximum transfers to 133 MB/s (the 32-bit/33 MHz PCI limit), but that's good enough. Now, what is interesting is that fast USB 3.0 pendrives, working in USB 2.0 compatibility mode (which identifies itself as "USB 2.1") are the fastest pendrives there are. The Patriot Supersonic Magnum 64 GB and the less expensive Kingston Data Traveler Ultimate G2 32 GB leave any and all USB 2.0 pendrives in the dust by much, and work out of the box with NUSB. The Kingston Data Traveler HyperX should be good also, but I still didn't test one of them (although I sure intend to).

[rloew]

There are no drivers for USB 3.0 for Win 9x/ME that I know of. There is a USB 3.0 PCI (not PCI-e) card available: StarTech PCIUSB3S2, which, of course, limit maximum transfers to 133 MB/s (the 32-bit/33 MHz PCI limit), but that's good enough. Now, what is interesting is that fast USB 3.0 pendrives, working in USB 2.0 compatibility mode (which identifies itself as "USB 2.1") are the fastest pendrives there are. The Patriot Supersonic Magnum 64 GB and the less expensive Kingston Data Traveler Ultimate G2 32 GB leave any and all USB 2.0 pendrives in the dust by much, and work out of the box with NUSB. The Kingston Data Traveler HyperX should be good also, but I still didn't test one of them (although I sure intend to).

I tried to use the XP Version of the USB 3.0 Driver for my Motherboard using my WDMEX Stub but encountered multiple incompatabilities even after stubbing or implementing the missing WDM Functions.

If anyone knows of a Windows 2000 USB 3.0 Driver. I might be able to do something with it.

[dencorso]

@RLoew: This collection may interest you. And this is (pre-RENESAS) NEC v. 1.0.14.0 driver, the earliest one (09/30/09) I was able to lay hands on, up to now. I think no Win 2k driver was ever created.

[Monroe]

OK ... have another USB 2.0 question ... this one is a little different. I have an old Dell Latitude Pentium III notebook that only has one USB 1.1 port. Years ago I bought a Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Notebook Card for it to get faster transfer speeds. I have never really been able to get that card to work properly. I have NUSB 3.5 installed on the computer and the card is recognized and can give me a 4 minute transfer over a 14 minute transfer of a 700 MB file but it will never uninstall correctly. My computer will freeze up and I can't shut down except the hard way and then Scandisk runs on startup. When I do a Control - Alt + Delete to shut down, it never shuts down and I always see that "MSGSRV32 Not Responding". I am sick of seeing that message many times when I have computer problems. Is there any newer fix for this in 2012? ... a newer version of MSGSRV32 or some way to correct the problem? It's like I see that most of the time for so many problems. Needless to say I don't really care to use that USB 2.0 card at all. Anyone familiar with this Belkin card?

Will just add this: when I put the card in the PCMCIA slot these two items will appear in Device Manager ...

NEC uPD720101 USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller

NEC USB OPEN Host Controller (E13+)

thanks ...

Edited April 30, 2012 by duffy98

[Monroe]

Well, I have a new observation to report about USB 2.0 speeds and that Seagate 500 GB USB drive. From my other post, I am in the process of updating my notebooks from Windows 98SE to Windows XP Pro. Earlier I made the discovery that I was getting fairly fast USB 2 transfer speeds with Windows 98SE and the Seagate USB hard drive. I was able to transfer a 700 MB file in about 45 seconds or so ... just today, using this Seagate drive with my newly installed XP setup, the same files are transferring at 25 seconds ... I am impressed at this faster transfer rate.

I don't have access to Windows 7 ... I have to ask, does this transfer speed sound right, are others also seeing a fast transfer rate at times for files with a USB hard drive?

dencorso, we aren't talking USB 3 type speeds with this one drive, are we? ... you have talked about USB 3 in an earlier post. What would be your or anyone's guess at how fast a 700 MB file would possibly transfer with USB 3? ... I transferred several different 700 MB files and the little box was always showing 25 seconds ...it was fast.

thanks ...

Edited May 14, 2012 by duffy98

[Multibooter]

I am in the process of updating my notebooks from Windows 98SE to Windows XP Pro. Earlier I made the discovery that I was getting fairly fast USB 2 transfer speeds with Windows 98SE and the Seagate USB hard drive. I was able to transfer a 700 MB file in about 45 seconds or so ... just today, using this Seagate drive with my newly installed XP setup, the same files are transferring at 25 seconds

1) Win98SE Explorer has serious issues. To copy, move or delete files I always use Beyond Compare, never Windows Explorer.

2) I always do file copying, moving or deleting under WinXP, very rarely under Win98.

3) Under WinXP I rarely use Windows Explorer, nearly always Beyond Compare for file operations

4) After copying files with Beyond Compare, I always make a binary compare with Beyond Compare of the source and the target.

5) If you use several computers simultaneously, speed becomes a secondary concern. The integrity of the copied data is the key thing. I knew a German engineer who used to say: "Langsamer ist schneller", i.e. "slower is faster". Copying with an eSATA PC card is much faster than with a USB 2.0 PC Card, but I have postponed using my eSATA PC Cards because I don't yet trust the integrity of the data copied with it. The speed of the CPU and the rpms of the HDD are among the key factors for the resulting transfer speed.

6) I try to stay away from Seagate, even if I have quite a few of them, I don't entrust my data to a Seagate. I have my backups on 7200 rpm Hitachis and Samsungs, in USB docking stations and in Thermaltake enclosures.

[dencorso]

dencorso, we aren't talking USB 3 type speeds with this one drive, are we? ... you have talked about USB 3 in an earlier post. What would be your or anyone's guess at how fast a 700 MB file would possibly transfer with USB 3? ... I transferred several different 700 MB files and the little box was always showing 25 seconds ...it was fast.

On my rather old harware USB 3.0 can do that in 7 sec. On a razor-edge hardware, it can go down to about 3 sec. Using XP in both cases, of course... there're no drivers for USB 3.0 for Win 9x/ME, and it's unlikely there ever will be any.

[Multibooter]

I transferred several different 700 MB files and the little box was always showing 25 seconds

On my rather old harware USB 3.0 can do that in 7 sec. On a razor-edge hardware, it can go down to about 3 sec. Using XP in both cases, of course

Hi dencorso,,

That sounds very impressive, but not sure about caching effects. A real-life test would be to low-level format a 1TB HDD with HDD Low Level Format v2.36. On my 2.2MHz dual core desktop (USB 2.0 onboard) under WinXP it takes about 10 hours (about 27MB/s), on my 11-year-old 700MHz Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop (USB 2.0 PCCard) about 25 hours (about 11MB/s), when a 1TB 7200 rpm SATA HDD ["3.0Gb/s"] is in an external EZ-Dock docking station.

The full version used to be free, but now the free version has a speed limitation of 50MB/s, http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/ excellent program.

The fastest interface for Win98 seems to be eSATA, about twice as fast as USB 2.0, but I am not yet sure about the reliability of eSATA.