Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

how to find out if external HD uses USB 1.x or 2.x?

(1/4) > >>

brotherS:
Hi,

how is that possible? I have the feeling that it should *not* take almost a day to move 50 GB from one external HD to another. Both drives are what's being sold these days, not old crap.

f0dder:
If you 1.5MByte/s transfer speed or less, the case is running in usb 1.x mode. If you get more than that, it should be running in usb2 mode... how high you'll get depends on a lot of factors, but you're not likely to reach the theoretical usb2 max speed of ~60MByte/s... protocol overhead and other stuff.

I've tested my (relatively crappy) enclosure with multiple drives, and I usually get around 20-30MB/s - and slightly more if I connect with FireWire instead, but I don't trust that because of some data corruption issues.

mwb1100:
I have the feeling that it should *not* take almost a day to move 50 GB from one external HD to another.
-brotherS (April 02, 2007, 03:12 PM)
--- End quote ---

I wonder if transferring from one external to another is killing throughput.  If you have space on a local drive to store the data temporarily, it might actually be faster to copy from one external to the local drive then copy from the local to the other external.

Also, if you have either or both of these drives connected via a hub, move it/them to ports on the PC itself.

I wouldn't be surprised if USB drivers/controllers/hubs aren't very good at dealing with  hi-speed throughput to multiple devices concurrently.

Remember to use a good copy utility (robocopy or such) that knows how to do copies with large buffers and overlapped I/O so the device drivers have the best chance of getting things optimized.

However, shoving 50GB of data around will still take some time - I'd guess that an hour is the best possible time you'd get, and that's with all components being top-notch.

lanux128:
brotherS, you can easily check what version your USB controller is by doing the following:
1. Call up the Device Manager.
2. Expand the Universal Serial Bus Controllers branch.
3. If it says "Enhanced USB Controller", then your system is USB 2.0. Otherwise, if it says "USB Controller", then the system is USB 1.1.

i agree with mwb1100, you have to use specialized copy program to do the transfer.. my own personal experience, 40GB in about 20-30mins using xxcopy. btw, microsoft's robocopy (reputed to be one of the better copy programs) now has a gui

mouser:
thanks lanux for those tips

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page