Really slow external hard drive. WTF?!

[dafoe]

A wile ago I bought a 500 GB Western Digital Mybook. I can transfer to and from my Vista laptop at about 20MB per second. I don't know if that's normal or not- the drive claims transfer speeds of 420 MBPS. But I guess I can live with 20.

The problems comes in when I try to transfer data from the external to my old P4 1.7 GHZ Windows 2000 PC. I set up a transfer this morning and in about 8-9 hours it has only transfered about 23GB!

After seareching Google I still have no idea what is causing this or how to fix it. I have 4 USB (2.0) ports which are all in use. I dont know know if that affects anything or not.

The transfer speed is really slow over my wireless network too. The best I can do is around 6MBPS if I hook up my laptop directly to my Pc with a crossover cable. Depending opn what kind of mood the PC is in.

But the slow transfer speed with the USB external has me at a lost. Any advice would be much appreciate.

[minidv2dvd]

the usb2 interface has a total transfer speed of 480M bits /s = 60M Bytes/s. the drive on the laptop is probably doing fine at 20MBps if you know the difference between bits and bytes.

just a guess but i'd wager the win2000 machine is only usb1.0 or usb1.1 not 2.0, as it's transfer speed is about 12Mbits/s total so anything else using the usb will slow the transfer to a crawl. check the installed devices list for "enhanced usb controller" to see if it has usb2.

[Seeker47]

the usb2 interface has a total transfer speed of 480M bits /s = 60M Bytes/s. the drive on the laptop is probably doing fine at 20MBps if you know the difference between bits and bytes.

just a guess but i'd wager the win2000 machine is only usb1.0 or usb1.1 not 2.0, as it's transfer speed is about 12Mbits/s total so anything else using the usb will slow the transfer to a crawl. check the installed devices list for "enhanced usb controller" to see if it has usb2.

That sounds like a good guess to me. I've had serious problems with my desktop system, which I haven't had much chance to address. So, I fell back to using an older laptop, for the time being. Using ConvertX from the laptop, with a DVD burner in an external housing (because the laptop's burner reads DVDs but only burns CDs), it is taking at least 6 hours (!) -- the DVD burning part of that has to be at least 2 hours. Painful ! I had to let the job run overnight. And I'm concerned it may wear out the burner prematurely in this situation, due to the extended burn. This same job would take about an hour on the desktop (which is only single core P4), or maybe two at most. The burn part of that would not exceed 15 minutes, with the desktop system. Has to be for the reasons you mentioned.

[dafoe]

Thanks for the replies guy. I checked out my motherboard and despite some advice to the contrary, it is not USB 2.0 capable. What a POS! I thought about breaking down and buying a new machine. But I really don't see the point. I'm just going to buy a USB 2.0 PCI card, a new video card and some more RDRam.

Again, thanks for the replies.

[nekrosoft13]

this will sound harsh to you, but stop investing money in that POS.

you could build a PC that is light years ahead of your machine for maybe 300-400 bucks.

[PhoneMatt]

On the other hand, if you would rather spend that $300 filling your gas tank, you can always check Newegg for a USB 2.0 card. I picked one up for $9.99 a few months ago, popped it in my old POS and never looked back.

[minidv2dvd]

dafoe - did you see this thread i posted about cheap components?
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic357010.html

[edDV]

You will never see 60MB/s sustained transfers for USB2 hard drives. 20-32 MB/s is more realistic. eSATA will allow full speed sustained rates.

[dafoe]

I know I'm in the minority here. But I'm never really been into the top of the line stuff as far as PCs go. I like computers. But on my list of hobbies it's pretty much at the bottom of the list. I don't think I've ever spent more than $150 on any PC component except for my first CD and DVD burners. I'm not really into showing off my system to buddies as almost none of them are into computers.

Outside of this USB thing, this machine does what I need it to do. And I got a USB 2.0 card on ebay for $7 shipped. Unless a new PC can do something that my old one can't I really don't care about getting something new. I don't really do anything that I would need more CPU power for.

I'm getting a new video card. Well, I got one. But it was supposed to have SVideo out. So I dont know if I'm going to keep it. My video card crapped the bed. So right now I'm running a card I pulled out my first PC- a P2 450 I will need more memory to run the new card. Someone at work said he had some sticks from his fried board he would give me. He was the one that convinced me to build my system with RDRam at the time. So the Ram might end up being free.

Until I buy a Blu Ray burner I think I will just stick with this. It may be a POS. But it almost never gives me any problems.