Thinkpads Forum

Last year I bought a Lacie 40MB USB external drive and almost immediately began having problems with it.

A comment in another thread gave me an idea. Since my TP USB connection is USB 1.1, which is very slow, is it possible that this is causing the problem with my Lacie drive (i.e., a buffering problem?)

What makes this question more important is because I'm considering buying a replacement external drive, and don't want to have the same problem.

Yep, USB 1.1 sucks big time performance-wise. You will get about 11MB/sec transfer rates at best. This is as bad if not worse than the speed you get while copying from a CD.

Buy a PCMCIA 2.0 USB adapter for about $20 and your problems will be solved.

Even better is to buy a PCMCIA USB/Firewire combo card for just about the same amount so that you will not have to go back to the store when you want to do something with Firewire.

Last year I bought a Lacie 40MB USB external drive and almost immediately began having problems with it.

A comment in another thread gave me an idea. Since my TP USB connection is USB 1.1, which is very slow, is it possible that this is causing the problem with my Lacie drive (i.e., a buffering problem?)

In my personal experience, USB 1.1 does slow down the transfer rate from an external HDD, but it always works just fine.
I have Thinkpad T23, T20 and 770X, all of which has USB 1.1, and two USB HDDs. I have encountered no problem so far in any combination of the above, other than a bit slow file transfer.

Since you have not described any detail of your problem, I have no idea what is happening. I think you better first tell us more detail of the problem.

One more point. You can buy a USB2.0/Firewire card for faster connection. But you should not expect a x40 increase of the transfer rate, as estimated from the comparison of the maximum data rates of USB1.1/2.0. In my experience, use of a USB2.0 increases the data transfer rate by 2-4 times of USB1.1. I don't know what actually limits the data rate but that was what I got. There may be a way to further increase but I don't know either.

When I was trying to clone a hard drive yesterday with CMS bounceback software, it had a transfer time listed of only 12 minutes. It compared the amount of data using USB 2.0 to detemine that. I've got 1.1 and it took over 2.5 hours to transfer (and had errors to boot). That's 12.5 times slower than 2.0.