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?