Thinkpads Forum

Hi, all!
I've been told from a friend of mine who has a X200s.
the usb ports on the left side is about 1/2 speed of the one on right side.
I'm using HD tune with an external usb hdd for testing, the right side is stable at 28mb/s
but left two usb ports are only 17mb/s
Same result when I tested with a X200t machine, besides X200t has only 1 usb on the left side, but 2 usb ports on the right side, only the one on right side close the palmrest is acting normal.
I thought it could be a OS issue, but I've been tried recovery back to Vista, XP, even installed with a Windows 7 beta, same results!
Or I thought it could be the same for all Thinkpads, but all 3 usb ports act normal when I tested with my W500, so I think it has something to do with a X series' motherboard design etc.

I've been searched on interest finding any same issue, but couldn't find any.

Are there any of you have the same problem?

I don´t have any of those models, but I believe there is an OS patch to improve USB power management. The improvement is significant. If your HD is set in BIOS to run in AHCI mode (which I believe is default for the new ThinkPad line with Vista preinstalled), one needs to have IMSM driver installed for better performance. Also, in Device Manager one should set the attached storage device to "optimize for performance" as Vista defaults to "optimize for fast removal".

Hope this helps,

Marin

Yes it's true there is a disparity in performance. I had 2 external USB drives connected to each of the left USB ports on the x200s. My transfer speeds were around 14MB/s. After putting the reading drive on the right USB and the writing drive on the left (back) USB port, my speed increased to about 19.5MB/s.