Today, I loaded up Ubuntu Dapper Drake with a LiveCD on my Tecra M7, connected the external HDD, and deleted the 40GB Linux partition in order that I regain this for backup purposes of the M7’s data. I then resized NTFS (windows) partition to the full 160 GB afterwards in the LiveCD Ubuntu environment.
When I restarted to Windows, however, it treated the external HDD rather oddly. I did a My Computer right click > Manage > Disk Managment in order to see how it viewed the HDD. It said the full capacity was 120 GB (the size before I resized the NTFS partition) in the top window section, however in the graphical layout below, acknowledged a capacity of 160GB in the NTFS partition. Strange.
I figured at that point that Linux had kind’ve screwed up the partition table on the drive, so it’s better to just copy the data somewhere else, and format/repartition the whole drive. This lead me to copying external HDD -> external HDD through the M7. I needed to copy about 80GB of data, so I left it alone for about an hour. When I come back, I find that it’s only copied 6GB, or at a rate of about 1.5 MB/sec. This is pathetically slow, and not what I expected. I know that when copying this amount on my my dad’s desktop from drive to drive, it takes much less time.
So, off to research on Wikipedia about this, I find that the three main transfer speeds for USB are:
- Low Speed – 187.5 KB/sec
- Full Speed – 1.5 MB/sec
- Hi-Speed – 60 MB/sec
The article notes that most Hi-speed devices typically go 30 MB/sec in the real world. So, at this point it is apparent that my transfer from HDD to HDD was going at Full Speed rather than Hi, for some reason.
This leads me to ask the question: what’s the bottleneck? The Tecra M7 has USB 2.0 Hi-speed ports (not all USB 2.0 devices are necessarily capable of Hi-speed), and both HDDs are USB 2.0 Hi-speed as well. There is no apparent reason for why it would throttle down to Full speed. I also noticed that when connecting two external USB HDDs to my laptop or my dad’s desktop, the second one may come up as an unrecognized device. Fiddling with the cables seems to get it to work eventually. I’m not sure why this is either.
The following are my hypotheses/observations for why this operation is going slow:
- The OS is a little screwed up. Things tend to not do what they’re supposed to do in general.
- The USB device icon w/ arrows that pops up in the task bar told me that I need to do something to get them to go their full speed (though gives no clear direction as to what to do)
- I’m using stock USB drivers from the factory install of this computer’s OS.
- I probably need to update the drivers, and maybe the BIOS too.
For now, I am just using a desktop computer to copy the files at Hi-speed, since it can already do this. I’ll have to check for updates for the BIOS/USB drivers while I’m waiting for the files to copy. Toshiba actually has a half-decent support site.
