Low speed on external HD

[mr soft]

Hello all.

I have a weird problem, I have recently built a system.
When I plug in a external 500g sata, it reports that it would perform faster if connected to a high speed usb. My bios is set to detect 1.1 or 2.0 auto.
I tried all the back usb slots and the front ones and I´m stumped.
Any advice welcome.
The HD is a sata II diamond maxtor
running xp sp2
mb GIGABYTE M56S-S3 ATX AM2

[FTT]

USB2 is installed with XP SP2 and will be verified if you look in Device Manager under usb devices with the words "Enhanced controllers" If it is not there, check your mobo manual to be sure they are in fact usb2 and then possibly rerun SP2 or look for usb2 drivers on your mobo driver disk.

[mjc]

Also, many motherboards split the USB...some may be 1.1.

Make sure that the one you are plugging the drive into is actually a 2.0 port.

[mr soft]

I finally figured it out, It was the usb cable. At least I think it was ,I swapped it for another cable and no warnings, it just started fast transfer speeds.
The other cable was from my older Fujitsu camera .
Does this even make sense ? Can some cables only have 1.1 connectivity?
Drove me bananas for a few days.

[Sylvander]

My external USB HDD comes with a USB 2.0 "Smart Cable".
The USB 2.0 circuitry is built into the plug that's integral to the cable.
By doing things this way a single [slightly more expensive] USB 2.0 cable can be used with multiple [less expensive] external drive enclosures of different types [various HDD's and optical drives].
When I first bought the original enclosure and cable it wouldn't function because the cable [USB 2.0 circuitry] was faulty.
That was replaced and the replacement cable worked fine.