Painfully slow USB HDD access - SORTED

[Xoni]

Title says it all.

I have a P5K-E WiFi AP mobo and am using the onboard USB 2.0 slots. I have tried two different sockets, both with the same results - access to my Seagate external hard drive can take over 5 minutes.

Not just the first time. It seems to constantly need to scan the drive for contents - I can move a file there once and it goes in flash, a few seconds later I'll move another and the thing will just hang for over 5 minutes. It gets extremely frustrating - especially when I'm waiting to close down.

I do have a spare PCI USB 2.0 board, but don't see how it will make a difference (but am willing to try if someone thinks otherwise).

Any suggestions (apart from ditching the drive) gladly welcome.

O/S is Win7 Home 64 and the drive is used for (frequent) back-up storage only.

JD

[burble]

It's worth trying the PCI card, you've nothing to lose.

Have you tried using a different USB cable? Does the event viewer in Windows say anything of interest?

[CaptainCrash]

You could also try taking the drive out of its enclosure and attaching it directly to one of the motherboard ports - that way you could rule out (or not) a problem with the enclosure itself, and you could also run the drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility, which probably won't work over a USB connection.

My money would be on a dying drive, but there's no point in chucking it out until you've confirmed the worst.

[Xoni]

Thanks for the replies - I probably will be trying the USB card at some stage.

Someone once mentioned that USB data transfer was very slow with Windows, so I wondered if it was normal - but now I see it isn't, I'll try just about anything.

It shouldn't be a dying drive, as it is only a couple of months old. tbh, it's been slow for so long that I can't remember if it was always this slow, or if it started after getting a certain amount full. I do regular scanning and defragging, too, but it is about 94% full now, of 250GB.

As for the cable, the only other one I have that would fit it was from a mobile phone utility, so I don't know if it would be suitable. I wouldn't want to buy another one just on the offchance that it's the culprit.

JD

PS - I just remembered that I have used it with my notebook and it wasn't so slow (also Win7, but 32bit) but then I only offloaded a few files from it to the notebook, so I will have to try that again and see what it's like writing to the drive.

[shaithis]

USB access is slow compared to a SATA/eSATA connection but it should be seconds, not minutes to access it and mostly the speed difference is noticed on data transfers, not access times.

[killie99]

does it work ok on another machine? If not then I'd suspect the drive rather than a problem with the computer.

[muddyfox470]

I agree with Killie99.
Don't rule out a damaged harddrive, if this is the case try and remove as much data off the drive as quickly as possible.

If you try another read/write device in the same USB port and see how that writes then it will give you an indication whether it is the port, computer or harddrive.

It doesn't take much to kill a harddrive unfortunatley.

[Xoni]

Thanks again for further replies and suggestions.

I've just finished doing an hours' worth of testing with the drive on my Acer notebook and had no issues whatsoever.

That notebook's CPU is half as fast as the one on this, my main PC, and only has 1GB of DDR2 800MHz RAM, running Win7 - so it is relatively underpowered, yet performed very well with the hard drive.

I only have memory card read/writers and a couple of USB memory sticks that I can try in the PC USB ports, and they work fine.

So something just isn't right. I tried the drive on my PC's front USB ports and the ones mounted directly on the mobo at the back - same story on all of them.

I have two other PC's - both somewhat older (an Athlon64 based one running Vista and a Duron 1.1GHz one running XP) and I'll test it with those tomorrow.

Thing is, if it runs okay on those, then where does that leave me? Will it simply mean that this particular type of drive and my P5K-E USB don't work well together?
That's the only solution that I can think of in that case.

So then I'll try the PCI USB card and see what happens. As a last ditch effort.

JD

[CaptainCrash]

Just a thought, is USB "high speed" (as opposed to "full speed") enabled in the BIOS? If not, it'll run at USB 1.1 speeds (12 Mbit/sec, or 1.5MB/sec).

edit: probably not the problem, if your flash drives are working OK...

edit 2: Is it a 2.5" external drive, ie bus-powered, or a 3.5" drive with its own power supply?

[Xoni]

edit 2: Is it a 2.5" external drive, ie bus-powered, or a 3.5" drive with its own power supply?

That is a very good point, actually, and something I'd not thought of

It's a 2.5 inch drive, powered by the USB bus power, so that may well be the issue here, as my USB ports are very busy.

I have a powered 1.1 bus connected, but that may be too slow? Somewhere I have a USB 2.0 one knocking about. It has no psu, but I've loads spare and one will surely do the job, so I'll try those, in order.

Thanks for that - might just have hit the nail on the head

JD

[Xoni]

That was it

Still not exceptionally fast, but a big improvement with the powered USB hub.

Ta again.

JD

[CaptainCrash]

Glad it's sorted, and thanks for reporting back with the outcome.

Out of interest, most 2.5" USB HDDs come with a dual-plug USB cable (or two separate cables), so that a second USB socket can be used to provide extra power if needed (IIRC each one can deliver 500ma max). Do you have one of those you could try?

Also, are you getting problems with any other USB peripherals? I'd have thought it was unusual for the entire bus to be overloaded... maybe the +5V rail on your PSU isn't as healthy as it might be?