USB 1.1 vs IDE

[crokett]

So... the desktop died again. The system has USB 1.1 onboard and I added a 2.0 PCI adapter. Problem is I can't boot from the USB DVD drive unless it is hooked to the onboard and booting is sloooow. I will have more than a few reboots for recovery. I have an extra IDE DVD drive in an enclosure. Is it worth changing out the onboard CD-ROM for the DVD drive to speed up the boot times?

Things are not going well. First very slow (like 20 minute) OS load to do a recovery, Win 7 recovery util said it couldn't find a HDD. I decided to boot Linux Live CD to see what HDDs it sees. Couldn't find the Linux CD so went to burn a new one and the new laptop doesn't have burner SW installed by default. Installing it now but the VPN connection over wireless isn't the fastest thing in the world.

[cgallery]

Yes, IDE optical drive is substantially faster than same on USB 1.1 bus.

[poolhound]

USB 1.1 is V slow.

If you have a Mboard that doesnt have USB 2.0 isnt it time to get a new one!!

[crokett]

The system is on loan from work and has plenty of power for what I use it for. I put the IDE DVD in it and it is a LOT faster than the USB 1.1. Bad news is I can't get the SATA controller driver to load to do the system restore. I used to be a lot better at this stuff. The other problem is, after I get it booting again, I discovered that the controller apparently never actually mirrored the data after I changed a drive out last month.

[dbhost]

Stab the EIDE optical drive in and let it go... Don't bother with USB 1.1 for anything other than keyboards, mice, Winmodems, and web cams... Any sort of I/O intensive hardware will just saturate the slow hardware and keep it that way...

[woodturner]

The system has USB 1.1 onboard and I added a 2.0 PCI adapter.

Some motherboards have one or two USB 2.0 ports and the rest USB 1.1. Depending on the age of the motherboard, might be worth trying a different port. Typically (but not always) the first port on the back is the fastest.

[crokett]

Ok, so now I am stuck. At least I think I am. I have Win7 at home installed on a RAID 1 mirrored set of SATA drives. Trying to recover the install from a system image. The recovery CD I built during the install can't find the HDDs, I expected this. There is an option to load drivers. I select that but instead of getting the expected 2 options to load either the SI3112 driver or the 3152 driver, I get a long list of both. I know it worked before since I got Windows installed originally. I brought the driver files into work to look at on a running Win7 system and when I add new HW and tell it I have a disk it gives me the two options I am expecting. I looked at the .inf file and it looks like there are lots of options based on the OEM for the adapter and that is what the Win7 recovery is showing me. Presumably there is something wonky with the Win7 recovery CD. I tried a couple random choices, none of which worked. I'd really not reinstall the system at home. Is there some creative editing I can do on the inf file?

[cgallery]

It is also possible that there are a ton of options but that they all select the same driver with the same parameters.

Are you going to try to stick with RAID? I note your comment above that the 2nd drive never got mirrored. If you want to keep the RAID, then I say experiment with some of the choices you're confronted with when loading drivers. If you aren't going to keep the RAID, then switch the mode of the SATA ports from RAID to AHCI or compatibility.

[crokett]

Ugh. I really used to like computers. So I booted my Linux CD to verify the hard drives and it can see the Windows partition and files just fine. I copied the driver files from the install off to my USB key and tried the Windows install again using the same version of the driver it was just running ok with. Still couldn't see any drives. I thought maybe the array being out of synch was a problem so thrashed it and recreated it. The controller is copying the data over now to resync them. Will see what happens.