I stand corrected. I thought 8 meg was standard since i’ve seen 32 meg performance drives.
Working fine (he’s not using it as an external unit). Here’s the reason why it was so slow for me
I’ve got a whole bunch of things plugged into that hub since it’s a royal PITA for me to get behind the PC case.
I’m not sure if the attribution of the above quote is correct, as it wasn’t tagged.
Anyway, just about everything it says is incorrect.
Isochronous, as used in the USB and Firewire standards, is a transfer mode that provides guaranteed and reserved bandwidth. This is important for video and multimedia applications. The telephone system, excluding VOIP, uses isochronous transfers for transporting the data bits for a telephone call. Each call is allocated a 64 kbps full-duplex channel through the network.
USB, USB2 and Firewire all use a shared medium. That means that the total bandwidth is shared among all devices on a particular bus. If the total bandwidth is is 400 Mbps, and device A uses 100 Mbps, that leaves 300 Mbps for the other devices on the bus. Most computers support more than one bus, for example I have a PC with two independent USB ports (2 x 12 Mbps) and three independent Firewire ports (3 x 400 Mbps). If I plugged all of my Firewire devices into a single port, I would be limited to a total bandwidth of 400 Mbps. If I spread them among the three available ports, the total bandwidth increases to 1200 Mbps.
USB and USB2 are complicated by their support for multiple device speeds. USB supports low-speed (1.5 Mbps) and full-speed (12 Mbps). USB2 supports low-speed (1.5 Mbps), full-speed (12 Mbps) and hi-speed (480 Mbps). When a low-speed device is active on the bus, let’s say a mouse, the entire bus is running at low-speed. When a full-speed device is active on the bus, let’s say a Zip disk drive, the entire bus is running at full-speed. The bus controller, typically a chip on your motherboard, automatically changes the bus speed from low-speed to full-speed to hi-speed, depending on what device it is talking to. This means that the total bandwidth is dependent on what sort of devices are plugged into the bus and how active each one is. 480 Mbps is the best case and 1.5 Mbps is the worst case. If you have two independent USB2 ports, it may be a good idea to put all of the low-speed and full-speed devices on one port, and all of the hi-speed devices on the other port. This ensures that the hi-speed devices have access to 480 Mbps of total bandwidth, since the bus never has to switch to a slower speed to support low-speed and full-speed devices.
USB2 hi-speed operation requires the use of cables and hubs that are designed for hi-speed operation. The use of a common USB hub will force all of the hi-speed devices to run at full-speed (12 Mbps), since the hub is incapable of operating at hi-speed.
Blame Canada