I just bought myself an 80GB harddrive and USB2 caddy for it. Plugged it into my USB port, configured my automounter and was able to use it fine.

However, it appeared rather slow and when I checked USB View it was only using the USB 1.0 Controller (at 11Mb/s) and not the USB 2.0 Controller.

I have tried each of the 3 USB ports I have on my laptop but no matter which one I choose it always connects as USB 1.0.

Fyi, I have the following USB modules loaded:

$ lsmod | grep usb
usbhid 32576 0
usb_storage 68416 1
usbcore 107292 7 uhci_hcd,ohci_hcd,usbhid,ehci_hcd,usb_storage
ide_core 148512 6 ide_scsi,usb_storage,ide_cd,ide_disk,ide_generic,sis5513
scsi_mod 121868 4 ide_scsi,usb_storage,sd_mod,libata

And this is my automounter config:

portable -fstype=vfat,noauto,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=0007,rw,exec,sync :
/dev/sda

How can I force my drive to connect at USB 2.0? I got the drive to backup my data before I rebuild it with a 64bit OS...but at USB 1.0 that is going to be rather painful

to be honest, i'm not totally sure how, or even IF, ehci_hcd, the USB2.0 driver responds to USB1.0 / USB1.1 devices. i reckon it will sort them out, but i don't know. if they're not being used by other devices, try removing uhci_hcd and ohci_hcd from memory. you shouldn't be loading both of those either, only one will work with your chipset so the other is a waste of time.

I've been googling for a little while, and i'm unable to find any mention of priorities for which to use... you'd think ehci would always be the prefered choice... maybe it's the order they are loaded in... can't say, hopefully someone else will know, as i was right there last night with my new Nomad Jukebox....

I tried removing each of uhci/ohci in turn and was able to isolate the one my USB mouse needs to work (and i presume the one that supports my chipset). I guess the question now is why isn't ehci picking up my damn external hard drive!

$ lsmod | grep hci
ohci_hcd 19396 0
ohci1394 35460 0
ieee1394 110712 2 eth1394,ohci1394
ehci_hcd 29444 0
usbcore 107292 6 ohci_hcd,usbhid,ehci_hcd,usb_storage

Do you think it is because ohci_hcd listed first against usbcore? I don't think I will be able to choose the order of load as they are compiled into my kernel...

Just found this on a Mandrake forum which looks promising...

http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/review92.html

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I also borrowed an external usb2 harddrive. The same as with the flash-card happened, it was automatically mounted to /mnt/removable1. Unfortunately I was not able to transfer data at the USB2 speeds, the maximum speed I got was around 1MB/s, which is USB1.1 -- at over 95% cpu usage. I am not sure if this is actually my motherboard revision, I have the Asus A7V333 V1.01 and it wouldn't surprise me if USB2 is actually not completely properly implemented. It may also be linux, but I know plenty of people who have USB2 equipment working at full USB2 speeds (for a harddrive, a transfer speed of 5 to 10MB or more can be expected -- usually the harddrive is the limiting factor, not the USB2 bandwidth), even on A7V8 series motherboards (which are very similar).

Update! (22 Jan 2004) The external USB2 harddrive can work at high speed (20MB/s) -- if I mount it by hand, instead of letting supermount do its thing, it works ok. I had the following in my /etc/fstab:
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/hd-sda1 vfat rw,noauto,user,exec 0 0
which I put instead of what Mandrake automatically created:
none /mnt/hd supermount dev=/dev/sda1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,codepage=850,kudzu,iocharset=iso8859-15 0 0
and like this, I can mount the drive as a user with:
mount /mnt/hd-sda1
and all works fine.

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...but I don't have /dev/scsi... Even though when you connect the drive the syslog shows it connecting on something very similar to the /dev/scsi/host1/bus...blah above.

i still can't see anything that implies any form of preference between ohci and ehci...

I have just removed ohci and uhci so only the USB2 controller is enabled (using ehci) and when I plug in the external drive there is no output to the syslog. It is like the controller is not watching any of the usb ports.

Is this turned on somewhere?