Slow USB in Windows 7

nihil ;
You did not say what revision you desktop board was, but I am not sure you are correct about USB 3.0.
From what I can gather it has 12 USB 2.0/1.1 ports, but the front panel ports are capable of 3x USB Power Boost which, basically, provides USB 3 power through the port for greater compatibility with newer devices.
( There is also a utility called On/Off Charge that controls fast charging of things like iPhones. I have not used that so don’t know how it works, but it should of been included on the motherboard disk. )

Any problems noticed in System Information concerning conflicts/sharing or Forced hardware ?

Hi there IKnowNot,

I don't know the MoBo revision, but CPU-Z says "x.x" so I suppose that it is a first edition? :)

You are right about the USB, all the ports are supposed to be 2.0/1.1

There is nothing in the logs or device manager suggesting any problems.

Obviously I don't expect the desktop machine to perform spectacularly better than the laptop, as performance depends on the task, and your slowest component. It's just that the laptop does considerably better, when I would have expected them to have been very similar, with the desktop having a slight edge.

I don't normally set great store by it, but I think I will have to try some benchmarking to see if I can narrow it down.

Vista relic, Wincode is wincode, Win7 keeps it, to use flash drives in Win7 you must burn an image on the flash drive first to properly format the device. It's a file system thing, nothing to do with the hardware, imo.

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It's a file system thing, nothing to do with the hardware, imo.

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Well, I will go for system/software settings, but certainly NOT the file system. After all, they are identical for both machines. Both run Windows 7 and both are reading the same USB stick with the same data.

I can understand why a more powerful machine might not be faster in performing certain tasks, but not significantly slower?????? :confused:

Have HP got some secret tweak they are not telling us about?

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Originally Posted by nihil

Well, I will go for system/software settings, but certainly NOT the file system. After all, they are identical for both machines. Both run Windows 7 and both are reading the same USB stick with the same data.

I can understand why a more powerful machine might not be faster in performing certain tasks, but not significantly slower?????? :confused:

Have HP got some secret tweak they are not telling us about?

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Most "sticks" are FATsomething or other...ime. I could be wrong.

Yes, they are usually FAT32. That still doesn't explain the performance difference I have encountered. I will be building a cheap system later this week.............2 core Amd, ddr2 and Windows 7. I will test that one before I ship it.

You have raised another thing I haven't tried..............

I have an 8GB USB2 formatted in NTFS. I will load the files onto that, and see what I get from the two machines in question :)

I'd be interested in knowing what you find.

OK, how is this for a WAG ...

You have a usb keyboard and/or mouse attached to desktop.
Win 7 is detecting that ( or you have legacy support enabled in bios and it is detecting that ) and it is loading the usb 1 drivers. Since the laptop does not have them, it loads the usb 2 drivers.

Check the USB host controllers in the Device Manager.
Any that have Universal Host Controllers are USB 1
Any that have Enhanced Host Controllers are USB 2

Hi there IKnowNot,

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OK, how is this for a WAG ...

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Possibly WAG, but certainly food for thought!

Yes, the desktop has USB Keyboard and mouse attached. There is only one PS2 port which is colour coded for a mouse or keyboard, but I imagine is really intended for a keyboard, so that you can get into BIOS setup.

AFAIK the legacy USB support isn't turned on, as that is the normal default? Anyways this board will only support an AM3 processor and DDR3 memory, so USB legacy isn't very likely as a default requirement.

The strange thing is that the laptop also uses a USB mouse, and the finger pad is deactivated.

Where I think that you have hit on something is that there is a tiny USB dongle type device still plugged into the desktop. It is the interface for a wireless mouse and keyboard.

I tried the desktop with some different data and got 9.6MB/sec. This was via a new USB2 bar that I connected to one of the mid-board sockets.

The data are mostly .pdf or .avi files, and it does seem faster (on both machines) if they are not arranged into folders?????????

I know that .pdf files have a lot of metadata, as it is a publishing & printing format; but I am using the same data for each test.

I don't think that the system is not recognising USB2, as I should only be getting 1.47~1.50MB/sec for USB1.1, and I am doing a lot better than that.

I have been wondering about dual channel, but the desktop has 4 matched Corsair strips @ DDR3-1333 whereas the laptop has 3GB of DDR2-800. Either way, I wouldn't expect the RAM to be a bottleneck?

I shall keep looking :)

Thanks for your time and support.

I have been doing some looking too. My wife has a similar ( Intel ) Gigabyte motherboard, 12 gig 1333 Ram. Etc. ( GA-X58A-UD3R ) Also very slow speeds from USB2 devices.

From what I can tell, the Gigabyte motherboard will load both USB 1.1 and USB 2 controllers through the BIOS, even if legacy devices are turned off and there are NO usb devices connected. That is why there are both the Enhanced and Universal controllers in Windows 7 ( The board is listed as having 12 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports ) I assume this is for compatibility with USB 1.1 devices and the OS chooses which to use based on device.

Like you , when I plug in a USB 2 device it transfers at speeds at slightly over USB 1.1. ( It even puts a 2 after the name of the device ) Going from device to desktop max of 15.7 MB/s, from desktop to device max of 2.04 MB/s.

I have tried changing settings ( turning on caching for the device, the default was off ) but no change.
I have been looking to see if Windows 7 has all the proper 64 bit drivers for ALL devices, and although they are not the latest ( SP1 not installed ) they are all correct.
I’ll keep looking.