Hard Drive Slow Down

I've been noticing some major performance drop off with my older Freecom HDD (the 400GB one). When I checked all the bases I found that it was being mounted as a USB1.1 device rather than USB2.0 (i.e. 12Mbps instead of 480Mbps max transfer speed!). No idea why unfortunately. No amount of dis-mounting, re-mounting, switching ports, cables and like seems to have any effect.

So I've dropped a line to Freecom's support people and await their input with interest.