Ext. Hard Drive is slow

I just purchased a Western Digital 80gb USB 2.0 external hard drive. Everything works pretty well except that its extremely slow. It says its a 7200rpm and it doesn't go anywhere near as fast as my two internal drives which are 7200rpm. I figure it has more to do with the USB ports than anything. In the back of my computer, I have two USB 2.0 ports and thats where I have this hard drive plugged into. How can I find out if it's using USB 2.0 or not? Is there software that could tell me if the ports are working with USB 1.1 or 2.0?

If it's not that, are all external hard drives this slow? I had the impression before purchasing this that external hard drives could work just as well as internal hard drives, only difference being where the drive is located.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 were different port shapes. Sort of like a usb some usb prinder cables have a little end and a usb 2.0 end. I always thought the little square end was 1.1.

The other thing I might be wrong about is I was under the impression that the data transfer rates for usb's were a lot slower than internal cables like IDE and SATA.



This much I do know if they have a different cache size their speed can be affected a larger cache is better.

 

Here is my hard drive:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=109

I noticed that it has a buffer size of 2MB. That is most likely my problem. I needed an external hard drive so bad that I just went out and bought the cheapest one I could find. I never bothered to look at the buffer sizes.

Is there a way I could change the buffer size or am I stuck with what I have?

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a bad drive. I recently purchaced this one
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=32
and I did notice a small improvement in data access speeds. As far as buffer size goes I don't think having a larger buffer really makes a whole lot of difference. I don't think you can change the buffer size without rebuilding the physical drive.

There may be windows tweaks that can optimize the use of this drive, but I don't know what they are

If you've ever had anything plugged into that port before you might want to make sure the drivers aren't conflicting.

 

No, the USB 1.1 and 2.0 are the exactly the same shaped ports.

 

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