listening to mp3s from USB hard drive -- slows down whole system?

[David Yang]

hey all,

it seems that whenever i listen to mp3s off an external USB hard drive, my system eventually slows down to a crawl after awhile. at first i thought it was just a problem with itunes and wmp being slow, but this continued to happen after i switched to winamp. the windows task manager would list winamp as using something like 25 megs of memory and 55% of the cpu. i highly doubt that's normal.

i suspect that my system slows down because of the constant reading from the external hard drive. i have about 40 gigs of mp3s on a maxtor 120 gig external drive (USB 2 interface).

so my questions are:

1. how much load do USB devices, particularly hard drives, put on the cpu? is my theory a plausible one?

2. do you guys know of any sort of "system bottleneck" utility that i can use to figure out just what it is that's slowing down my computer?

thanks a bunch.

dell latitude d600 1.4 ghz pentium M
maxtor 3000LE

 

[LTC8K6]

Is the USB port running at USB2 speeds?

You could run HDtach on that external drive and see what kind of transfer rates you are getting.

 

[TheLonelyPhoenix]

Are you doing this while jacked in to the wall or running off battery? The Latitude in particular is really stingy in its power allotment, in order to conserve battery life as long as possible.