billa2000 Posted June 26, 2004 Report Share Posted June 26, 2004 Duplicate backups to external USB 2 and Firewire hard drives that should take minutes are now taking hours. I've tested the drives without Retrospect by doing a Windows copy and paste of a 6 GB file and get the 900 MB/min or better performance that I would expect when I read from the drive, but when I try to write to the drive, I get the same slow result that I get with Retrospect: the speed drops down to about 80 MB/min. I've tried several Firewire and USB drives and get about the same result. My files are generally large (100MB to 400MB) but this has not been a problem in the past. The computer I'm backing up is a Dell 8300 running Windows XP Pro. I have 1Gig of RAM and at least 70% spare capacity on all my hard drives. Any idea what could cause the write speed on all my external hard drive to drop down to USB 1.1 speeds when I'm using Firewire and USB 2? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 Hi It may be XP system restore. try turning it off for the external drive. (right click on my computer and go to properties) Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
billa2000 Posted July 6, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 6, 2004 Thanks for the System Restore suggestion, but I'm afraid that it did not help. It still takes just over five minutes to copy 975 MBytes of data to the external drive. Copying that same data back to an internal drive takes about 35 seconds, which is what I would expect. I've tried the same external drive on another Windows XP computer and it performs perfectly with both read and write times for the 975 MB of data taking 30 to 35 seconds. The external drive has both firewire and USB2 ports and I've tried both with no improvement in the slow write speeds on my primary computer. While it sounds like a Windows XP resource allocation problem, I get the same slow write performance when I use the DOS copy command from the DOS prompt. Any suggestions on how to isolate this problem would be greatly appreciated as I'm about to give up on my new Dell 8300 computer. I've tried defragging and just about everything else I can think of. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted July 7, 2004 Report Share Posted July 7, 2004 Hi Can you plug the drive into another computer and give it a try? It may just be a problem with the disk write cache or something. That would explain why you had trouble with both Firewire and USB Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimhoy Posted July 7, 2004 Report Share Posted July 7, 2004 Considering that you've tried several drives and the other things you mentioned, it looks like a Dell hardware or POSSIBLY an operating system problem. Assuming you've searched Dell's online support, I suggest you give Dell Tech Support a call. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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