kira laucas wrote: > now that you have mentioned it, i have noticed recently that my desktop > motherboard usb port has gone slower. i mean previously i used to get 28-30 > MB/s transfer speed with my external usb drive. but now the max i get is > 10MB/s . i have tested the external drive on my friend's laptop and to my > surprise it transferred with 25MB/s ! is it any indication of any > potentially disastrous hardware failure issue ? I wouldn't think the system is about to fail if it's just going slower. If there are specific error messages that point to it's failing then maybe. Errors quoted earlier just seem like bad hardware(perhaps poorly designed or built, rather than hardware that is physically failing). Only thing I can suggest is to just verify that the drive is detected as USB 2.0 via lsusb -v e.g. Bus 004 Device 020: ID 1058:0702 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. Device Descriptor: bLength 18 bDescriptorType 1 bcdUSB 2.00 [..] iManufacturer 1 Western Digital iProduct 2 External HDD I believe the 2.00 indicates USB 2.0, I see several other devices on my USB that are marked as 1.x If the device is bus powered, make sure it is getting enough power, some of my bus powered disks I have to use a USB Y cable to plug the drives into two ports simultaneously(one for power+data, the other for power only). If you configured your system's kernel to ignore the irq errors as the other poster did(I think your a different poster..didn't check), you really should remove that option and enable the checking again, and try a PCI USB expansion card instead and see if that helps. nate