USB 2.0 speed problem.

[essential]

I recently purchased a Maxtor 250gig OneTouch II drive for my fathers computer. He is always worried about loosing files. He has a two year old gateway. It came with 4 USB 1.1 plugins, but does not have USB 2. I purchased a Belkin 5-port pci USB 2 card, and installed it in his machine. I was told by maxtor that the drive would run at USB 2 speeds with that card. I just installed everything about 30mins ago, and am doing the first backup, and it seems to be backing up his files very slow.

My question is, since the computer did not support USB 2 to begin with, will the Belkin USB 2 card run at USB 2 speeds, or just default to USB 1.1? I'll be upset if I purchased that card to basically have 5 additional USB 1.1 plugins, heh. How can I check? Can anything be done?


Thanks.

 

[Subhuman25]

What OS?

 

[essential]

Windows XP Pro. 🙂
(with sp1 and sp2).

 

[essential]

Bump, anyone, heh?

 

[Anubis]

the card duns at USB2 regardless of what the comp is because it has its own controller, if its connected to the drive and running slow my guess woudl be that the drive dows not support USB 2

 

[Boonesmi]

even at usb 2.0 speeds it wont be as fast as an internal ide harddrive

just curious, have you used the external drive on both the onboard (mobo) usb ports and the new controller card ports?

if there is a big difference between the two then its probably working right, but if the they are fairly similar in speed then something is very wrong

 

[essential]

my guess woudl be that the drive dows not support USB 2

The drive supports USB2, I am positive of that.

have you used the external drive on both the onboard (mobo) usb ports and the new controller card ports

I have not tried this. I will try that next time I back up the machine. The backup today took about 50mins to backup 12gigs. Does that sound right? I thought USB was able to do up to 480Mbps.

Thanks for the input.

 

[TechnoPro]

A lot of factors can contribute to a slower than expected speed. Disk fragmentation, hard drive activity caused by other running processes, number and size of files, etc. Did you copy and paste the files from PC to to the external drive, or are you running some sort of backup software? If it's the latter case, I suspect the software was performing the first full backup, with each subsequent one being a differential or incremental - depending on the setup. This first full backup involves more than just copying files.