Some of you have helped me out so far in this saga, so this one’s for the brains out there.
I have a Dell Dimension 8200 that I recently found out only has USB1 onboard ports. I just added an external USB 2.0 hard drive, and noticed that the transfer speeds were incredibly slow, so today I went out and bought a USB 2.0 PCI card. The install went smoothly and it shows up under the device manager as working with no problems. But the transfer speed is the same slooooooow transfer that I was getting before; I’d guess about 1mb/second or so. Since I’m about to move around 300 gigs to the new hard drive, I really need a faster transfer rate than that.
So what’s going on, and what should I do to fix it? I’ve already:
Tried “update driver” for each thing appearing under “USB” in the device manager. They’re all current.
I have XP service pack 2 and all updates.
I tried disabling the mobo’s USB1 in the BIOS and seeing if that was somehow causing a conflict; nope, it still transfers just as slow as it did.
I uninstalled all USB devices and restarted and let XP reinstall all of them. Same situation.
When you installed the drivers, did you just let XP install the default drivers, or did you install drivers from the disc supplied by the manufacturer?
Check the device manager under “Universal Serial Bus Controllers” and see if it shows your card as installed and working properly (no “!” or “X” on it). If all is well you should see some stuff about USB 2.0 listed there also. Could be the drivers, like Fear Itself mentioned.
I’m not sure on this point, however I recall reading that for the connection to run at 2.0 speeds, everything in the chain has to be 2.0 compliant including the USB cable itself. Anything bought in the last couple of years should be fine in that regard, but if by some chance you are using a really old (or long - USB only carries so far without signal degradation) cable you might want to swap it out.
Next, take another look in the BIOS and see if there’s anything that actually limits the speed of the USB ports. There may be an option to choose a higher speed. Check not only the actual mobo USB options but anything about the PCI bus as well since that’s what the card is on.
How much stuff do you have using PCI slots? IIRC all that bandwidth is shared so if you’ve got a PCI NIC, PCI video card and other stuff all working at the same time that might kill transfer speed.
Did the installation specifically show the external hard drive listed as a USB 2.0 device? Perhaps something hiccuped when installing drivers for the external enclosure.
Finally, what kind of data are you moving? One huge file or a million teeny ones? That will impact transfer speed.
Is it plugged in to one of the ports on the 2.0 card? Because those are going to be the only 2.0 ports… It doesn’t upgrade the whole system.
I specialize in common sense answers, because it that’s what tends to be my problem when I have something wrong. I go as deep in to the system as I can to find the answer, and then realize I forgot to plug the device in.
Also, make sure for the purposes of your testing that that drive is the ONLY thing plugged into card – no other devices, no hubs. It used to be that USB 1 devices plugged into USB 2 ports would slow down the other devices on that same hub – I don’t know if that’s still the case.
Kind of a long shot, but does your BIOS support USB 2.0? I had this issue a couple of years ago (couldn’t get USB 2.0 response from USB 2.0 device in a USB 2.0 PCI card) and solved it by upgrading my motherboard. I could have upgraded just the BIOS, but I needed a new board anyway.
I first used the drive that came on the CD, and figuring that it might be outdated, I used Windows update to search for a better driver. They claimed the one I have is the most current.
I’m assuming that it does, because it’s a popular computer model (Dell Dimension 8200) and I’ve read many comments online about how people upgraded theirs to USB 2.0.
I didn’t think about it. I have an AGP video card, PCI audio card, and PCI NIC in there also. But wouldn’t I see at least SOME performance over the initial USB 1? It seems like it’s operating at the exact same speed, which makes me think that something’s limiting it to 1.0 speeds or operating as a 1.0 device or something.
I have a similar setup on both my desktop machines, one is a couple of years old with USB2 on the motherboard, the other about six years old with USB 1.1.
The difference in transfer speed is significant. Both have other USB devices plugged in too (printers, cameras, trackball, etc. that don’t appear to impinge on the USB performance.