# USB upstream speed **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 17, 2004, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-upstream-speed/240592 "2004-04-17T23:44:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![black\_rabbit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/f19dbf/32.png) [@black\_rabbit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/black_rabbit)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-upstream-speed/240592/1 "2004-04-17T23:44:47Z")
Ijust installed a new 40GB hard drive in my notebook, and stuck the old 20GB one in an external USB 2.0 enclosure for backups and such. Unfortunately, I’ve only got USB 1.1 ports on the computer, so the transfer speed is pretty damn slow. I’ve already got files transferred over. At 800-900 KB/s from the old drive to the new one, it took about 6 hours. I’ve reformatted the old drive from Reiser to FAT32 with fdisk and mkdosfs, so that I can use it as portable drive in OSes other than Linux. Anyway, now I’m attempting to transfer about 10GB of files **back** to the external drive, and it’s dog slow. I’m talking like 8-140 KB/s. What gives? Is the downstream bus speed **that** much slower? I’m not expecting lightning speed here, but I don’t particularly want to be waiting 24 hours for this. My specs: PIII 800 384 MB 40GB 4200rpm 8MB (internal) 20GB 4200rpm 2MB (USB) Suse 8.2 Pro / default kernel Hmmm… maybe I need to invest in a USB2 PCMCIA card… off to Google…