Slow USB in Windows 7

Hi, this is to do with Windows 7 64bit SP (fully patched).

It concerns two computers, one is an HP Laptop and the other a desktop I built myself. Both automatically check for, and provide updates when available.

The desktop has an AMD Phenom II x6 1090T 3.2~3.8GHz with 8GB of Corsair DDR3 1333, and 2x 1TB 7200rpm SATA drives.

The laptop has an AMD Athlon II x2 M320 2.1GHz with 3GB of DDR2 RAM. It has a 250GB 7200rpm SATA HDD.

Transferring files and folders from USB2 memory sticks seems slow in comparison to XP Pro SP3, but I have heard that is not an uncommon complaint regarding Windows 7 and Vista on a variety of hardware platforms.

What is puzzling me is that I transfer files from USB 2 memory sticks and get the following results:

Laptop: 3760MB in 480sec = 7.83MB/sec
Desktop: 7270MB in 1920sec = 3.79MB/sec

I have tried both USB sticks on the desktop and the transfer rate seems pretty much the same.

Remote Differential Compression is disabled on both machines.

:confused:

Any ideas folks?

When you google your thread title it appears that you have many friends in the same boat;)

Wouldn't hurt to verify that System Restore isn't enabled on the mem sticks..

Sorry - have to ask - did you install USB drivers from the mobo makers web site?

Hi Steve, and welcome to AO.

The USB driver/management stuff is what came in the box as far as the HP laptop goes.

The desktop (tower) has a Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H/US2H.....the difference is that mine has the all solid capacitors, which I don't see as an influence here?

I have been wondering though; the board and case support USB3 and the sticks are USB2. They are supposed to support earlier USB, but are they treating anything not USB3 as USB 1.1?

If you stick a USB2 into a USB 1.1 port you get a message that it could perform better if you used a USB2 port.............I don't get any message like that though.

Weird? :confused:

EDIT:

Sorry, I used the DVD that came with the MoBo, so they are the manufacturer's drivers and management software. No system restore, and the sticks behave the same on the desktop.

Check this while the flash drive is plugged in.

When you open the device manager and go through your usb root hubs (right click and properties) then goto the advanced tab. Does it say full speed or high speed?

The other thing to check would be a setting on the flash drive. Open my computer, right click on your drive and click properties. Select your flash drive from the list in the hardware tab, and click the properties button. In the new window, under the policies tab, is it set for performance or quick removal?

edit: my usb stick transfers on my laptop at 5.81MB/sec

Thanks Darksnake,

That got me poking around some more. :)

If I insert a flash drive it is set for quick removal, as that is the default. It is the same for both the laptop and the desktop. The only exception is an 8GB usb stick that is dedicated to "Readyboost", and I changed the setting to better performance.

The machine has 10 physical USB slots. There are 2 enhanced PCI to USB and 5 Open HCD USB host controllers.

There is one "USB composite device" which will be the adapter for the wireless mouse & keyboard, and 1 "USB mass storage device" which is the stick drive for Readyboost.

That leaves one?.................I stuck a drive in the front port next to the one that I have been using for the downloads, and got a Windows error message that the device was not recognised and defective. If anything, it is a problem with the port, as just inserting an extension hub gets the same message, and they don't normally show unless something is attached to them.

As for the other 7 root hubs (empty) they show 2 @ high speed and 5 at full speed.

Given that I shouldn't get more than 1.5MB/sec on a full speed connection I don't believe that I was downloading at FS.

I guess my next move is to troubleshoot the front USB port that isn't working.

I will keep you all posted.

Incidentally, the drivers are Microsoft, so Win 7 must have installed them.

:)

Readyboost. Haha, I see you've noticed performance changes with it. But not the performance changes Microsoft intended :rolleyes:. I'm also surprised that it was automatically enabled with readyboost. Unless you accidentally clicked enable when it was inserted?

I all seriousness though, have you ever used readyboost and noticed an increase in performance?

Hi metguru,

I am afraid I can't answer your question just yet, but should have an answer in the next 2 or 3 days when my mate comes round with the USB memory sticks in question.

At the time I was talking about, Readyboost was NOT activated on the desktop. Unfortunately, I am not sure about the laptop, as it has an SD card slot and I happened to have an SDHC card that wasn't compatible with my cameras. I stuck that in the laptop and may well have activated the Readyboost feature without knowing what I was doing :dunce:

In fact, that is probably likely, as the laptop is the only machine with a built in card slot. OK, I have an external one, as well as external HDDs, but a USB memory stick is a much more convenient way to transfer data for me. In those circumstances, I may well have thought: "let's give that improved performance thingy a try".

I won't have accidentally activated readyboost on the donor USB drive as I always kill the pop up menu and use Explorer (old school? old fart? :D)

What I have at the moment is the laptop with Readyboost enabled on a 4GB SDHC card, and the desktop with Readyboost enabled on an 8GB dedicated USB2 drive.

We will test the incoming USB stick on both. Then kill Readyboost and do it again. Then repeat the exercise on the desktop, using one of the rear USB ports that is connected directly to the MoBo. Remember I have already discovered that the front USB bracket has an issue with one of it's two ports.

I have never given Readyboost any thought until now, as it is apparently not supported on my Vista machine, which I built from old spares and only has USB1.1


I am curious to know what experiences you have had with it?

:)

Readyboost is something to consider if you only have 1 or 2 gigs of ram. It won't be an earth shattering improvement...

Hi Steve,

Quote:

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Readyboost is something to consider if you only have 1 or 2 gigs of ram.

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I don't think so. From what I have read Readyboost is aimed mainly at laptops with slow hard drives (4800/5400) and small caches. It uses the additional memory as cache memory, not as pagefile or RAM.

MS tell you it will do absolutely nothing if you have a solid state hard drive, which seems to support this.

In my case all drives are 7200rpm and have reasonable caches (8MB and 16MB) so I don't expect any noticeable performance improvement. I only stuck the SDHC card in because I had no other use for it, and there was this empty slot :D

I think the confusion with RAM comes about if your RAM is small and maxed out. In that case, Readyboost would be the only potential option for performance improvement, without the expense of replacing the RAM.

Another scenario would be a 32bit laptop that has 2 x 512MB strips in it. The MoBo may well support 2 x 2GB, in which case you are trashing the 2 x 512s.

I would probably go for that, and, because Windows 32bit can't really handle more than 3GB I would make the other 1GB a permanent ramdrive for the pagefile. If it had a 5400rpm drive I would consider Readyboost, but would probably go for replacing the HDD, based on the comparative cost of 4GB of quality SDHC and a 7200rpm 2.5" HDD.

I base that on the premise that a faster HDD will work for everything, whereas Readyboost seems to work here and there, depending on what you are doing?

I have now been able to test both the laptop and desktop with the same USB memory stick and data. I didn't use a stopwatch so the figures are reasonable approximations.

RDC is certainly disabled on both machines. I also tried the front USB port and a rear one...........there is no difference, so it isn't the fact that one port is defective.

Desktop (with Readyboost) 5.2MB/sec and 5.9MB/sec without.

Laptop (with Readyboost) 4.5MB/sec and 16MB/sec without.

That still leaves the laptop running faster than the desktop :confused:

I noticed that the progress window shows silly time left values with Readyboost enabled. Only the Laptop showed a credible progression when Readyboost was disabled. The desktop was plausible but incorrect.

I also noticed that the laptop deleted the contents of the test folder much faster.

I will now try the test on a Windows XP box, to see if there really is much of a difference.

EDIT:

P4 2.8GHz with hyperthreading and 1MB cache
2 GB DDR1-400
500GB SATA1 7200rpm HDD
XP SP3

3.90 GB/sec

WTF?

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.

Quote:

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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?

Quote:

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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,

Quote:

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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.

Hi,

Yes, when I Google I see that we are not the only ones.

Like yourself I enabled caching to no effect. You needn't worry about SP1 either, as both of my machines have that, and have had since I first started these downloads.

I haven't tried data transfers the other way though.............I will give that a shot and let you know.

I will also remove the USB wireless controller for the mouse and keyboard, and replace the USB keyboard with a PS2 one, if only so I can get into the BIOS. :)

I have wondered if my failed attempts to get Hybrid Crossfire to work might have an effect, but I can't really see why. :confused:

Quote:

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( The board is listed as having 12 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports )

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>>windows

apparently you're still allowed to push out crap products, but make the system appear to conform to the "rules"..

Hi,

Some more testing results :confused:

1. I took an 8GB USB 2.0 drive, wiped it, then formatted it as NTFS and set caching to "ON".
2. I copied the files from a previous download, as straight files without folders or sub-folders. They are mostly .pdf and .avi format.
3. There are 116 files making up 3310MB.

I modified the system:

1. Removed USB mouse and Keyboard wireless adapter. Installed a PS2 keyboard and wired USB mouse (there is only one PS2 port).

2. Went into BIOS and disabled both "legacy USB" AND "USB storage". They were both defaulted to "on". It turns out that the storage item refers to legacy kit as well.

The results were:

USB -> HDD 18.9MBps

HDD -> USB 6.7MBps

I appreciate that transfers to a USB stick are going to be slower than transfers from it, as the drive has management software to balance the use of its transistors; but that does seem rather a lot, and is consistent with IKnowNot's experiences.

I have just tested the desktop with a FAT32 USB2 stick, set to "quick removal", which is the default. I got 20.6MBps on the desktop, as opposed to 10.5MBps on the laptop.

So far it looks as if the drive format and the caching settings are irrelevant to this issue. I also suspect that the USB legacy support doesn't have any effect unless it applies to ALL USB devices.

On this MoBo's BIOS there is a separate setting for memory/storage devices, and disabling that may well do some good?

It certainly seems that the format of the files being downloaded has an effect, but I haven't really looked at that yet, as it is something you generally have no control over.

Unfortunately, I cannot compare BIOS settings as the HP BIOS is typical OEM and shows you very few settings other than those they permit you to alter. :(