USB/IDE drive runs weird during large file copy

[Zorro]

I just installed a 80GB IDE hard disk into an USB 2.0 mobile case.
Small files are pretty quickly copied but large ones 30 MB to 1 GB take an
extremely long time for the operation from the ATA133 to the USB disk.
I noted also that files look to be copied by couples in the same time.
All USB peripherals are of course frozen during the operations.
My OS is Win98SE.
Questions:
1- How to determine if the USB ports are working following 2.0 standard or
1.0 ?
2- How to proceed to determine if it's an hardware problem or a windows 98SE
issue ?
3- I've often had problems (slowing down, crash, freezing, ...) with
Explorer, with large files and or large number of small files, Anybody knows
an alternative to Explorer which may deal with such a problem ?

TIA

 

[Don Taylor From:]

Questions:
1- How to determine if the USB ports are working following 2.0 standard or
1.0 ?

From the usb faq at www.usb.org

How do I know if my PC supports USB? Where can I get USBReady?
http://www.usb.org/faq/ans3#q1

 

[Zorro]

Thank you very much for your answer
but sorry ... ,
I'm not asking how to determine if my PC supports USB.
The answer is obviously yes.

The question is: Are my USB ports running full USB 2.0 speed ?
Unfortunately the FAQ and the search I made on Internet don't help me.

In the mean time two questions remain:
2- How to proceed to determine if it's an hardware problem or a windows 98SE
issue ?
3- I've often had problems (slowing down, crash, freezing, ...) with
Explorer, with large files and or large number of small files.
Does anybody know an alternative to Explorer which may deal with
such a problem ?

Regards

 

[JAD]

Thank you very much for your answer
but sorry ... ,
I'm not asking how to determine if my PC supports USB.
The answer is obviously yes.

The question is: Are my USB ports running full USB 2.0 speed ?
Unfortunately the FAQ and the search I made on Internet don't help me.

In the mean time two questions remain:
2- How to proceed to determine if it's an hardware problem or a windows
98SE
issue ?

98se was not the greastest in dealing with USB 1, it was always an addon to
the OS. I think here it would be a driver issue rather than the actual OS.

3- I've often had problems (slowing down, crash, freezing, ...) with
Explorer, with large files and or large number of small files.
Does anybody know an alternative to Explorer which may deal with
such a problem ?

Is DMA enabled on the hard drives? Do you defrag? what about IDE ribbon
change.
any memory errors..BSOD's?

 

[Don Taylor From:]

Thank you very much for your answer
but sorry ... ,
I'm not asking how to determine if my PC supports USB.
The answer is obviously yes.

My apologies, you had originally asked whether your USB was 1.0 or
2.0. I thought that usbready.exe had a detailed view that determined
whether the USB hardware supported 1.0 or 2.0 mode.

But I don't find that now. I must have been using something else
that provided that information. I'll try to find that again. Maybe
it was from here http://www.lvr.com/usb.htm

The question is: Are my USB ports running full USB 2.0 speed ?

That is a wildly different question. Having written software in a
previous lifetime, "full speed" can mean very different things to
different people. Badly written drivers can run an order of magnitude
slower than well written ones. And those can run an order of
magnitude slower than pure hardware support. Multiple layers of
Windows before it gets to the driver itself can make a larger difference
than any of this.

 

[Zorro]

Is DMA enabled on the hard drives? Do you defrag? what about IDE ribbon
change.
any memory errors..BSOD's?

DMA is activated for both Primary master & Slave IDE disks.
The IDE connected through the IDE/USB interface doesn't allow DMA
configutation.

No, I rarely defrag. I usually wait for the files needing to be transferred
or backuped then I delete everything in the partition.
I must recognize I never defragged the windows disk.

Yes, the IDE ribbon needs to be changed. Not pretty good looking.

Never I had any BSOD under 98SE. (I'm just crossing the fingers!).

But again, problems occur only with big amount of files or big files
(several hundreds MB). I believe that in case of bad contacts within the
ribbon or connectors or even on a fragmented disk, it should happen
whatever the file size or the number of files are. Perhaps I'm wrong !

THanks again

 

[fj]

I just installed a 80GB IDE hard disk into an USB 2.0 mobile case.
Small files are pretty quickly copied but large ones 30 MB to 1 GB take an
extremely long time for the operation from the ATA133 to the USB disk.
I noted also that files look to be copied by couples in the same time.
All USB peripherals are of course frozen during the operations.
My OS is Win98SE.
Questions:
1- How to determine if the USB ports are working following 2.0 standard or
1.0 ?

Unless you've specifically installed USB 2.0 drivers, Win 98 supports only
USB 1.0.
Is this a home built pc or store bought? If it's home built, the specs for
the USB ports will be with the motherboard manual. If it's store bought and
it came with Win 98 - 99.9999% sure the hardware is USB 1.0 [that's all that
was available during 98's reign]
USB 1.0 with external hard drives should be in the 12M[ega]b[it]/s. So, a
30M[ega]B[yte] file should take ~ 20 secs. Is that what you're seeing?

2- How to proceed to determine if it's an hardware problem or a windows
98SE
issue ?
3- I've often had problems (slowing down, crash, freezing, ...) with
Explorer, with large files and or large number of small files, Anybody
knows
an alternative to Explorer which may deal with such a problem ?

This should not happen. This sounds like a symptom of a problem in your
system. As a starting point, are there any yellow or red marks in your
Device Manager?

And, just to confirm, have you done a spyware/malware scan recently?

Lastly, could you provide the hardware specs for your pc? Processor, amount
of RAM, pagefile size, hard disk size, how much free space on your hard
drive?

 

[Zorro]

I nitta install the USB disk drivers on a clean partition first. May be the
actual 98Se session registry is completely cluttered by lotta programs I
uninstalled. I'll come back.

Thanks

 

[Zorro]

Thanks, please read the answers within the message body.

[...]

Is this a home built pc or store bought? If it's home built, the specs

for

Answer:
Home built: Asus A7n8X Deluxe Ver 1.4. Drivers were updated from Asus site &
they're USB 2.0.

USB 1.0 with external hard drives should be in the 12M[ega]b[it]/s. So, a
30M[ega]B[yte] file should take ~ 20 secs. Is that what you're seeing?

Answer:
Yes and No !
With small files and or small Qty of files 500 K to 1.5 MB (40 files for a
total of 35 MB), the copy is quite instantaneous which should denotes a 2.0
USB port.
Should I copy a bunch of 32 files for a total of 93 MB, the PC _freezes_ for
40 sec.
And of course for a CD image (650 MB), it takes forever. The mouse appears
alive a small part of the time.
In this case for long periods 20 to 40 secs even the LAN traffic is
disturbed. The Autoconnect windows is open on the gateway (the ADSL modem is
connected to) showing no Internet traffic towards this computer.

This should not happen. This sounds like a symptom of a problem in your
system. As a starting point, are there any yellow or red marks in your
Device Manager?

Remark:
Windows Explorer is very well known for its instability.

Answer:
No. No address or IRQ conflict. I checked it.

And, just to confirm, have you done a spyware/malware scan recently?

Answer:
Yes, The cleaner is resident, AdAware is launched on demand. It was last
weel with the last signatures.
HiJackThis didn't reveal any peculiar trojan or similar.
Zonealarm is running in the background. Antivirus is run on demand.
MSconfig is launched on a regular basis and hi-level running processes are
verified at least one a day.

Lastly, could you provide the hardware specs for your pc? Processor, amount
of RAM

Answer:
Asus A7N8X Deluxe Ver 1.4 w/ Athlon 2400+
RAM 512 MB
Two IDE disks 40 GB each (MAxtor) and a CD burner (LG 52x24x52) Plus an SCSI
adapter card (AHA 2940UW) driving two SCSI disks (Quantum Atlas 9.1 GB
each), a CD-ROM drive (Plextor 40 max) and a scanner (Microtek ScanMaker+)
not currently connected.
LAN 100 network with 3 other computers all running under Win98SE + 1 running
under Win 2000. A Canon printer on one USB port, a Logitech mouse on the
second USB port and the USB/IDE drive on the third. Remain unused two front
ports and a rear one. The video Card is a Leadtech including Video in, video
out, two monitor capability as well as TV out. The USB modem is connected on
my gateway and the internet connection is shared through the LAN. SATA &
Firewire are not installed.

pagefile size, hard disk size, how much free space on your hard
drive?

Answer:
The swap file is on the primary disk. Its size is varying aroung 200 MB
during current copy operations at least when the mouse lets me browse the
disks! 1 GB remains free on this partition.

As I told in a previous message, I'll try to install the drivers on a
freshly installed Windows directory and I'll come back to the group.

 

[fj]

Thanks, please read the answers within the message body.

[...]

Is this a home built pc or store bought? If it's home built, the specs

for

Answer:
Home built: Asus A7n8X Deluxe Ver 1.4. Drivers were updated from Asus site
&
they're USB 2.0.

USB 1.0 with external hard drives should be in the 12M[ega]b[it]/s. So,
a
30M[ega]B[yte] file should take ~ 20 secs. Is that what you're seeing?

Answer:
Yes and No !
With small files and or small Qty of files 500 K to 1.5 MB (40 files for a
total of 35 MB), the copy is quite instantaneous which should denotes a
2.0
USB port.
Should I copy a bunch of 32 files for a total of 93 MB, the PC _freezes_
for
40 sec.
And of course for a CD image (650 MB), it takes forever. The mouse appears
alive a small part of the time.
In this case for long periods 20 to 40 secs even the LAN traffic is
disturbed. The Autoconnect windows is open on the gateway (the ADSL modem
is
connected to) showing no Internet traffic towards this computer.

My take is there's a conflict occuring. I've seen recommendations to try
removing all the USB devices in Device Manager and reboot. Apparently this
can clear up some USB conflicts.

Since the USB modem seems to be involved, I would try disconnecting it to
see if that made a difference.
Also, does it make any difference whether you're copying from the internal
IDE drives or from the SCSI ones?
While unlikely an issue, I'd want to make sure I've tried different sets of
files for the 'large' file set [i.e., 93MB]. It would also be interesting
to know if a single 93MB file has the same problem.

Perhaps as you can tell, I'm suggesting to 'poke around' to see if anything
interesting occurs - just my way of trying to do problem determination.

Good luck.