USB device speed too low?

I am new to LINUX/Knoppix and I am hoping to use it to make a backup/restore system for a 5-year-old Windows XP PC (see my other thread). I am posting here because I have found that in Knoppix my USB HDD is much slower than it is in Windows. The 'usbview' program says it's 12Mbps 'full speed' and I am seeing transfer speeds of 700kB/s, whereas in Windows I am seeing 17MB/s.

Can anyone help me to figure out what's wrong? I think the USB HDD should be running at 'high speed', which is much faster than 'full speed'. Windows must be running it at a higher speed, but I don't have a Windows equivalent to 'usbview' to check this.

One possibility is that my Knoppix version is too old to know about 'high speed', but I want to be sure about the reason before I download the latest version.

Thanks
Peter

In case anyone is interested, I downloaded the latest 6.4.3 and the transfer rate to the USB drive is much faster. It depends on the blocksize. With 512 bytes it was 1.1MB/s and with 32kbytes it was 21MB/s so that's going to be great for the job I want to do.

However, usbview still shows that the USB HDD is only 'full speed' and not 'high speed', and the Windows usbview utility says the same, so they do not seem to be able to detect that the HDD is able to use the 'high speed' mode.

Peter