USB 2.0 PCI Card

[moviebuff2]

I just installed a 3-port USB 2.0 PCI card in my PC. The motherboard in my PC has the processing rate of 533 MHz and +700 MB RAM.

I connected my USB 2.0 external hard drive to one of the USB 2.0 ports of the PCI card

I observed that when I turned on my external hard drive, other programs seemed affected. For example, it takes a little longer to open one of my audio editing program. And, my internet surfing also seemed affected - going from one page to another takes a little longer. In other words, the motherboard in my PC seemed to be "choked up".

The specifications of my motherboard's PCI slots and the USB 2.0 PCI card look pretty compatible. They use both 32-bit.

Any comments?

Thanks

[simonko]

Any expansion card you put into your pc takes resources away from your system. You could read the box and it will tell you the requirements needed, and then subtract that from your system specs and that is how much more slower your system will run.

It also could be that the drivers for your card just suck for your OS.

If you are accessing the contents of the USB drive, yes there is lag. Especially if it has to contantly read and cache to it. I know that from experience with my 4GB mini USB HDD.

[stiltman]

USB uses your CPU. I just did a quick test to see how much. I have a 2.6g CPU with 1gb RAM. USB chewed up on average of 50% of the CPU and peaked at 72%

I transfered a 2gb file via copy and paste.
System and Explorer.exe where using the CPU

BTW, firewire uses far less CPU cycles

[moviebuff2]

Thans for the replies.

The box of my USB card does not indicate any requirements, except these:

1) 32-bit 33 Mhz host interface compliant to PCI Specification release 2.2

2) Support PCI-Bus Power Management Interface Specification release 1.1

And the salesperson told me that my motherboard's PCI slots are of 32-bit and that should be fine. He was right. Everything works fine, transfering files, accessing files, etc. . The problem is that the USB card chokes my motherboard, i.e. consuming the CPU so much that it visibly slows down other applications.

Thanks again.

[ofbarea]

This is a limitation of USB2. It will be slower than firewire.

[bgclarke]

What brand of card, and what USB chipset is on the card?

I added a Vantec 5-port USB 2.0 PCI card to one of my PCs, and I have not noticed a significant effect on performance. It uses the NEC USB 2.0 chipset (the cream of the crop of USB chipsets).

If your PCI card has a Via USB chipset, make sure it uses the VT6212 chipset, and not the VT6202. The VT6202 chipset is unreliable; the VT6212 is better, but not by much.

[edDV]

For XP do the ctl-alt-del to bring up the Task Manager. Monitor CPU usage under "Performance" to see what happens when you transfer a file to the USB2 HDD. You will find that USB2 HDD control is CPU hungry.