Home > IT Answers > Storage > Adding an external drive improves my internal drive speed. What’s happening?
Jeffvan
15 pts.
 Adding an external drive improves my internal drive speed. What’s happening?
Storage Laptop Network
This one is pretty bizarre. I've got a new asus aspire one laptop. At first, I thought the LAN network card speed was terrible, because when I copy a file to the laptop, I get approximately 1% of the 100 Mbps available. After a lot of playing, I figured out that if I'm copying a file from the laptop to the server, I get good speed (approximately 90 Mbps). So, clearly the problem has something to do with the hard drive or configuration of the laptop right? I thought I should try copying something from the network to a drive on the usb port for comparison. Well here's the weird part... as soon as I plugged in the external drive, the copies to my external drive got fast (80 Mbps). I wasn't even using the external drive. Once the external drive has been plugged in, my speed is good until I reboot. BTW, I've verified the following: - The internal drive is not compressed - The drive is not indexed - Write caching is enabled - The are no updated drivers available for my hard drive (that I can find anyway) Can anyone tell me what's going on?

Software/Hardware used:
ASKED: December 27, 2008  2:54 PM
UPDATED: January 28, 2009  11:56 PM
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Answer Wiki:
What is the drive speed in RPMs? Usually laptops drives are around 5400RPM which is very slow when compared to 10K on a good computer or 15K on a server. External hard drives will also be faster than that. Another thing to consider is the transfer interface. Does the laptop use a Serial ATA drive or an older legacy ATA drive? Depending on what the laptop uses the transfer rates for the data on the hard drive will be capped at 3Gbit/s with SATA-2, 1.5Gbit/s with SATA, and depending on which legacy ATA drive it is the speed will be slower than that.
Last Wiki Answer Submitted:  December 27, 2008  5:25 pm  by  mshen   27,310 pts.
All Answer Wiki Contributors:  mshen   27,310 pts.
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go into msconfig and disable all of your startup items … reboot

make sure to disable your Anti Virus/Spyware etc

then repeat test without USB involved

if the speed is good then hunt down the software causing the issue

or boot from a LINUX LIVECD (like knoppix) and try the copy; if the speed is good then its a software issue

Bott
 100 pts.
 

Mshen, the drive speed is 5400 rpm, but the speed is only a problem when I don’t have an external drive plugged in, so, I’m not getting stuck on the hardware limitation. What I want to know is why it performs 80x faster just because I’ve plugged in an external drive (I’m not using the external drive… just plugging it in).

(just spotted a typo in the question that may have confused things – sorry – I’ll re-ask in a few days).

To be clear…
- Copying from the network to my internal drive… speed is 1 Mbps
- While letting that copy run, I plug in the external USB drive
- Suddenly my copy jumps to 80 Mbps

Jeffvan
 15 pts.
 

May be a defective south bridge. I would suggest reinstalling your OS, and if you continue to have problems contact the manufacturer to get it replaced.

mshen
 27,310 pts.