I just installed an Adaptec USB2 card into my CPU. The hardware installation went fine, but the software would not automatically install from the CD that came with it. I had to do a manual install which eventually appeared to be successful. So here is the question. The device works properly, the photos on the Memory Card Pro can be read, viewed, transferred, etc. and the Sandisk is USB2.0 compatible. In the device manager, I can see the driver (which is showing no problems) installed properly, along with the other drivers. How do I know if my photo tranfers are actually now running at a speed that goes with a USB 2.0 card and not at a slower speed? There is no way to tell, and I was concerned since that software did not install automatically from the CD. When I installed that driver manually, does that mean that it was automatically assigned to that hardware, or could it be just installed but not assigned to the right hardware? I just wanted to know how I could check if things were set up properly. The properties function does not tell me anything about that.

Thanks

What OS are you running, and with which service pack? I am going to go on a limb and presume that you're running Windows XP. My Biostar motherboard has USB 2.0 capabilities, and came with a driver disk.

Windows would not let me install that driver, and I never was able to use it. I was required to upgrade to sp2 before I could support USB 2.0.

How big is that SanDisk you are using? You really shouldn't be having any trouble determining what revision of USB you've got installed. If you upgraded from 1.1 and didn't see a huge performance increase - it didn't work.

USB 2.0 is 40 times faster than its predecessor. For 128 mb of transfer you're looking at something in excess of 1 minute vs something under 3 seconds.

Also if you plug a USB 2.0 pen drive into a Windows XP machine it will give you a pop up notice usually just above the taskbar saying that you have a "High speed USB device plugged into a non-high speed USB" hub. If it does not display that error message, it's running USB 2.0.

Edit: Any USB 2.o device should do the same, I'm usually using my Lexar 256MB Jump drive when I see it.

I am running SP2- I transferred about 250 mg of photos and it took almost a minute. But I didn't see that message about the device. I bet that is too slow for a USB 2.0. Well, if it is not running properly. What are the solutions?

With a transfer rate like that, you're at USB 2.0. The maximum throughput of USB 1.1 is 12 mb/s. Which translates into something around 3 minutes for that much data. Your results exceed the maximum of the 1.1 protocol.

I think your performance results reflect the overhead associated with file handling activities. What kind of results do you get with one big sustained file transfer?

Your harddrive will have an impact too, but probably not to a huge degree. There was a very noticeable performance difference when transferring to my 7200 rpm external usb compared to when I swapped the drive with a 5400 rpm disk.

That sounds reasonable. I will have to try some larger files.

Thanks

I agree that usb is functioning in enhanced mode. I would doubt if the HDD has anything to do with it but the pci bus might have a role. I have a pretty slick system with 1Gig RAM, Raptors, on board USB2 and DMA and to transfer 250MB from the Raptor to the USB drive takes 20 seconds.