LinuxQuestions.org - slow external USB harddisks

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slow external USB harddisks

Hi all,

I have several external USB harddrives connected to my system, namely two LaCie 500 GB boxes.

Yes, I realize that the USB interface is slower than IDE or SATA, but recently I noticed that read and writes to and from these drives where suddenly much slower.

Something is throttling the USB subsystem, but I don't know what.

I've made two major changes to my system recently: one was upgrading the motherboard, the other was upgrading from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8.

The motherboard is an Asus Vintage PH1. The USB subsystem is:

Code:

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)

I would be most grateful for any suggestions for figuring out where the bottleneck is.

Are you using a generic kernel (I.E. the one that came with your distribution)? It could be that there is a motherboard or USB controller specific fix in the kernel that needs to be enabled, which would require you to rebuild the kernel.

to that end, you might want to try it out from a Live CD, to verify if it is a kernel issue or a problem with your installed Fedora system. If you can also test from Windows, that would eliminate the possibility of a hardware issue.

MS3FGX, the problem appeared to much simpler than the issues you raised. It turns out that USB 2.0 was switched off in BIOS. I don't know whether this is a default value or the technician who installed the new motherboard (inadvertently) switched it off. Whatever. I now get the R/W speeds I was used to.

Well, that was certainly an easy resolution then. I was actually not aware that you could switch between 1.0 and 2.0 in BIOS. Certainly a strange default on a new motherboard...