Windows 7: Only my external hard drive hits USB2.0 speeds

In the past month I have added a new external hard drive, replaced my main hard drive, and replaced my power supply.

When I added the new external hard drive, I used a USB2.0 thumb drive to move some files also and I got normal speeds on it. A couple weeks after that (last week), I replaced my hard drive and PSU at the same time.



Last night I plugged in my USB2.0 thumb drive and was getting dismal speeds -- somewhere between 60kb/s and 5mb/s. Transferring the same file to my external hard drive got me 70-80mb/s. I moved the devices around to different ports with the same problem; the external hard drive got 70-80mb/s and the thumb drive got <5mb/s.
When I plugged the same thumb drive into my laptop (Windows 7 32-bit), I moved files at 25-30mb/s.

I updated my chipset drivers and saw no difference. Does anyone have any thoughts? Could I have done something wrong in relation to power to my USB ports?

As an aside, even just pressing "Cancel" on a slow file transfer takes FOREVER to stop. It will take probably 5 minutes for the file transfer to finally quit.

1. A thumb drive will not have the same transfer rate (read or write) as an external usb hard drive, depending on the quality of the flash memory what write/read speed the thumbdrive will actually have.

Not sure why it is slower on one PC compared to another.

What OS is it slow on?

I do notice usb works much better in Windows 7 as compared to Vista or XP, at least in my case.


Put the old PSU in, see it anything changes.
.

Are you 100% you're not using a USB 1.1 port?

It's not 1.1 - I can plug the external hard drive into that port and get 70-80 mbps. If I put the thumb drive in the port the external hard drive is currently plugged into I still get <5mbps.

I know that I shouldn't expect speeds quite as fast as the external hard drive, but it's at least 4-5x faster on my laptop than my desktop, which is what the concern is.

My desktop (problem computer) is running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. The laptop is running Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit. I've had the same OS on this desktop since it came out and have always had good (20mbps+) speeds with this same thumb drive until I noticed the problem a few days ago.

What kind of thumb drive is it?

Kingston 4GB DataTraveler 101 USB 2.0 Flash Drive - DT101Y/4GB - Buy.com

If you have the intel chipset and AHCI enabled in the bios before installing the OS you may need to install the intel matrix storage manager software /driver

Download here :
Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager

Latest Version :
RAID: Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver for Intel Desktop Boards

Im not sure this will work because you would think the problem would of been there before - seems to be related to the new hardware if so I would check your bios settings if they were somehow reset. However, if you have the intel chipset AHCI enabled and no matrix or rapid storage manager it fits the description for slow transfer rates, and no harm in trying.

Both of those told me something about my hardware not meeting the minimum requirements or something like that.

I looked around my BIOS. I saw a setting about SATA stuff and it was set to "Enhanced IDE." The other options were RAID and AHCI. Choosing RAID got me a black screen telling me to add a bootable device. Choosing AHCI got me to the "Starting Windows" screen before it crashed & rebooted.


Something completely unrelated -- any time I change something in my BIOS, I have to completely power off my machine to get it to completely boot again. It will POST, then it just sits on my ASUS splash screen unless I unplug the computer. Is that normal?

there is a fix for USING ahci - go here (dont forget I only said if it was enabled - it works fine on the ide settings but if you want to try do this registry fix firstly - Error message when you start a Windows 7 or Windows Vista-based computer after you change the SATA mode of the boot drive: "STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE"

No its not normal - with mine as I have it overclocked when it powers up it starts and then restarts again automatically - this is because it needs to reset the parameters. You might need to update to the latest bios.