Snow Leopard and USB 2.0 Problems
Ever since I did a reinstall of Leopard on my Desktop back in January, I’ve been having problems with the USB Ports and External Media – even though my motherboard is a USB 2.0 board, everything was coping at 1.1 speeds. I thought this had to do with the kext I was using for my USB, and figured it would correct itself when I did my Snow Leopard install the other night. Needless to say, I was still getting 1.1 speeds even after a clean install. I was able to live with this for a while, but now that I’ve been moving some files around that are adding up to some decent size (at least 10 GB transfers at a time), I figured it was time to figure out the root of the problem. A quick google search brought me to this site, and what proved to be a quick and easy fix to my problem. If you are too lazy to click through, all you need to do is delete AppleHPET.kext from /System/Library/Extensions/. The best way to do this is to navigate to the folder in Finder, and copy the kext to your desktop as a backup. Then, in a Terminal window, enter sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extentions/AppleHPET.kext to remove the file. Reboot your system and you should be able to copy files at USB 2.0 speeds once again.