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Computer help: USB portable drive

by Eddie_Brown - 3/21/06 7:34 PM
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Post 1 of 3

USB portable drive

by Eddie_Brown - 3/21/06 7:34 PM

I have a Toshiba Laptop A15-S129, running XPhome. I wanted to hookup a toshiba laptop harddrive via the usb port and use it for my backup disk. The problem is that the data transfer rate is 80Meg in 1 minute. To do a backup of my "MY DOCUMENTS" takes about an hour. The toshiba backup drive is a 60gig MK6025GAS and the specs are...
4200 rpm, latency 7.14/ms, 8 MB buffer, 12 seektime, internal transfer rate 202 to 308 Mbitx/sec, Host transfer rate 100 Mbytes/sec.

What could I be doing wrong? I have initialized the disk several times and formated it to NTFS. I have tried it with the jumpers set to slave and with NO jumpers installed, all with no effect. The disk is seen as disk1 in the hardware on system icon in control panel (disk0 is my main drive).
Thanks, Eddie

Post 2 of 3

Sounds right...

by John.Wilkinson Moderator - 3/21/06 8:33 PM In reply to: USB portable drive by Eddie_Brown

That actually sounds normal to me for one reason...I looked up the Toshiba A15-S129 and found that it has USB 1.0 ports, not high-speed 2.0. Thus, the maximum speed is 12 Mbits/sec, or 1.5MB/sec...that works out to 90MB/minute. Considering that the maximum theoretical speed, 80MB/minute is not bad at all. Thus, I'd say it's a limitation of the laptop and not an issue with the hard drive(s). The only solution, aside from backing up to a network, would be to pick up a USB2.0 PCMCIA card. Using that as opposed to the built-in USB ports would let you, theoretically, transfer data at 480Mbits/second, or 60MB/second. While you won't achieve that speed, it will be much faster than it is now, provided the enclosure you're using is high-speed 2.0-compliant.

Hope this helps,
John

Post 3 of 3

USB 1 vs 2

by Eddie_Brown - 3/22/06 9:39 PM In reply to: Sounds right... by John.Wilkinson Moderator

Thanks John,
In the system hardware section it lists the usb as "Intel(r) 82801DB/DBM USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller - 24CD" and the next line is "USB Root Hub". Is that to say that the description is for USB 2 but the hardware is USB 1?

What you say sounds correct. I hooked the same drive to the usb port on my dell server for backup and it did 3 gig in <3 minutes. It was so fast I thought it had missed some of the backup. Went to check and all was there.

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