USB thumb-drive... 1Megabyte/second?

[d000hg]

Plugged in my new drive and Windows showed me a "your drive can perform faster" with some bumpf about hi-speed USB2. It only showed the internal USB hubs as supporting this. Copying files, I'm getting sustained transfer of 900Kb/s for large files.

Is this a limitation of my aging desktop, or the key itself? I'm certain I plugged an external hard-drive into the same port the other day and didn't get the same warning...

[VectraMan]

IIRC USB 1 was 12Mb/s, so 1MB/s actual transfer sounds about right. So the limitation is the USB 1 port you're using.

[d000hg]

It says USB2 on the port... I unplugged every USB thing I could find and stuck it in different ports, one of them decided to work at 5MB/s which apparently is not too bad for USB2 in real life.

Bloody computers.

[greatcentral]

USB ports

I experienced this as well few times.
But it is mainly due the port you are using, the ports at the front of your desktop are usually slower than the ones at the back (attached to the motherboard directly).

Blood computers indeed!

[dmo]

Are you using a laptop? If so, you could consider getting one of these; I got one the other day and its pretty impressive considering it costs £6.91 all in. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Neewer-Expre...pr_product_top.

Theoretically speaking, however, 8Mbits (Mb) = 1Mbyte (MB). So 80Mb = 10MB, or 480Mb/sec = 60MB/sec. 480Mb is the theoretical max for USB2 I think (memory is a bit rusty but I cba to check it!!). Anyway, the above card uses the ExpressCard slot which runs at around 400Mb/sec, or 50MB/sec. USB pen drives don't usually have that kind of performance, most 16GB pendrives will probably perform in the region of 8-16MB/sec (64-128Mbits/sec) - so this solution should be more than enough.

The speed can be bottlenecked on the motherboard by all kinds of things - from a bad mobo design to begin with, to other peripherals using the same bus to read/write data - causing slowness for your USB drive.

[dmo]

It says USB2 on the port... I unplugged every USB thing I could find and stuck it in different ports, one of them decided to work at 5MB/s which apparently is not too bad for USB2 in real life.

Bloody computers.

Rubbish USB pen drive, or maybe you should try formatting it again and starting from a fresh clean drive. Could also be drivers for your motherboard itself - you might be running USB1.1 and not even realise. Happened to me in the past - the box for the PC said USB 2 compatible ports, but they only installed the USB 1.1 drivers, so I was getting seriously reduced speeds for quite some time before I noticed that upgrading the drivers for the ports was the fix.

Good luck