This is one of those annoying "buy why?!?" questions: My workstation is a P-III 1Ghz, Intel chipset, 512MB PC133 RAM, 10k rpm SCSI disc, onboard USB 1.1, as well as a PCI USB 2.0 card. Why is it, that when I plug my USB flash drive or a hard drive in a USB casing, into either the onboard USB 1.1 or the PCI USB 2.0 ports, it takes a good 6-10 seconds of grinding disc and suseplugger maxing the CPU, before I can access the drive? I see the same phenomenon at home - AthlonXP 2400+, SD-RAM, very slow disc - takes about 20 seconds of grinding although the CPU doesn't break a sweat in the process. What ticles me is on one of the mail servers I built, P-II 350mhz, running Debian Sarge, it was ready in a second. Also, my housemate's Mandrake and more recently Gentoo systems pick up the USB drive much quicker. Really what I'm looking to find out, is what is the bottleneck, and how can I eliminate it. During that 6-10 seconds on my workstation my machine is almost completely unusable. Thanks -- Kind regards Hans du Plooy SagacIT hansdp at sagacit dot com