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Slow USB in Inspiron 530
I have an Inspiron 530 that is about a year old. Since I got it, I noticed that the usb ports are very slow, and it has been particularly noticeable of late, as I hae been using flash drives to transfer some files from it to another computer. I have now checked this with 3 flashdrives, on 4 different computers (including ones that are older than the 530), and in all cases, the 530 takes about two to three times as much time to read or write as the others do.
Any suggestion to improve this speed would be appreciated.
I am using XP Pro SP3, and am plugging the flash drives sdirectly into the front 4 usb ports.
The other possibly relevant issue is that Device Manager has a yellow "?" at "Other device", "Unkown device".
TIA.
fireberd
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November 16th, 2009 14:00
Do you have an entry in the USB section of the Device manager that includes "enhanced controller"? If you do, then the USB ports are working at USB 2.0 speed.
Did the PC come with XP or did you install it? If you installed XP, did you fully install all drivers including the chipset drivers?
bearsfolks
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November 17th, 2009 09:00
Hi Fireberd. Thanks for your response.
I have 2 "USB2 Enhanced Controller Entries", as well as 6 "USB Universal Host Controller" entries. So all indications are that the ports are working at USB 2.0 speed.
The PC came with XP installed.
Just in case the drivers may have been corrupted, I recently reinstalled them, to see if things would improve, but they didn't.
I just ran a quick test on a 2gb stick, and it took approximately 4mins and 40 secs to download 1.37 gb onto the stick, and uploading it onto the desktop took 1min 21sec. Is this normal?
Thanks for your help
fireberd
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November 17th, 2009 15:00
Here is something I found doing a google search. It suggests that USB flash drives (USB "Sticks", "keys" or whatever you want to call them) are slower than USB 2.0 port speed. Internal busses and whatever the PC is doing can also affect the transfer speed/time.
How fast is USB 2.0?
USB 2.0 has a raw data rate at 480Mbps, and it is rated 40 times faster than its predecessor interface, USB 1.1, which tops at 12Mbps. Originally, USB 2.0 was intended to go only as fast as 240Mbps, but in October 1999, USB 2.0 Promoter Group pumped up the speed to 480Mbps.
As far as we know, effective rate reaches at 40MBps or 320Mbps for bulk transfer on a USB 2.0 hard drive with no one else is sharing the bus. Flash Drives seem to be catching up too with the some hitting 30MB/s milestone. For all we know, USB interface could become become the bottleneck for flash drives as early as 2008.
Additional notes from Alex Esquenet - our engineer friend based in Belgium: "A fast usb host can achieve 40 MBytes/sec. The theorical 60 MB/sec cannot be achieved, because of the margin taken between the sof's (125 us), so if a packet cannot take place before the sof, the packet will be rescheduled after the next sof. On top of that, all the USB transactions are handled by software on the PC. For instance, a USB host on a PCI bus will send or receive the data via the PCI bus; the stack will prepare the next data in memory and receive interrupt from the host."