External drive slow

I have a external hard drive (My Book Home Edition 1TB) hooked up to my iMac through a Firewire 400 connection. Thinking it was slow, I downloaded a utility called HD Drive Speed Test to compare with my other drives. When testing, it gives speeds at around 30 MB/s, which is not much faster than my other USB 2.0 connected drive.
I was expecting much faster speed from a Firewire 400 connected drive. Am I right? Is there something wrong? Any clue on what would be wrong? A problem with my Firewire 400 on my iMac? On my WD drive? With the cable? Any suggestion on how I could test and narrow the problem down?

That is good speed; when I back up to one of my externals - all of them FW 800, I get around 45 mb/s at most, usually settles in around 38 or so. If yours is 400, that's great (as long as your Mac is older and still has a FW 400 port - mine does not).
Add: one small additional thought: is your external a 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm drive? the former is much slower in writing than the latter.

Similar Messages

Update does NOT fix External drive slowness

I ran the update hoping it would solve the slowness issue when keeping your iPhoto Library on an external drive (mine being a Time Capsule).
Well, it did not - and I may resort back to 08, that worked perfectly.

I may have misstated this. The trial of Aperture was set, I believe, to use and save the photos in their original iPhoto locations (folders) on the same drive. I also was using 'show iPhoto browser' when trying this out.
So while not using the actual library file it was still a good test of using the same amount of photos on the same drive....

External drive slows down system

I purchased this 27 inch iMac last month. Its loaded. 3 TB HD, 32 GB Ram, 4 TB External Lacie Thunderbolt Drive.
The system slows to a crawl, with beach balls, slowness (I mean REALLY SLOW). I also have errors transferring files from the Lacie to the internal HD.
I got frustrated beecause I thought my files were corrupt (my Adobe lightroom catalog files were reporting as being corrupt). After a day or two of monkeying around, I zeroed in on the Lacie HD as the source of my problems. I reformatted, rebuilt the raid array, and restored from a Drobo....and voila! It worked.
For about an hour. Then, slowness returns. I ran the extended hardware check.....nothing wrong.
I called Lacie tech support. The guy asked me to unplug the drive and the power to it. Plugged everything back in, and voila again! It flew.
30 minutes later, more slowness. I called lacie, and the tech support person suggested I might have a bad thunderbolt cable and offered to send me another one (which will presumably be on the way tomorrow).
Has anyone had this kind of a problem? Do you think the cable might fix the problem? Or do you think the drive is defective?
Thanks
Kenny in NJ

Its not the drive. I have two external drives connected and mine are from Seagate. The problem most likely occurs between the iOS and the USB/Thunderbolt/Firewire connections.
Any response from Apple?

Updating our old mac, 10.5.8. New external drive slowed/.stalled once a quarter was done.

Very new at this. The touro external 1tb needed to be re formatted and something to do with the petition. Did this and then started the time machine. Worked great but has stalled on 46gb of 267gb.I thought it had stopped but doing it extremely slowly. Any answer would be of great value
Cheers
Ben

Hi selleck56,
If it appears that Time Machine backups are going very slowly or are stopped, you may want to use the steps in this article to troubleshoot -
OS X Mavericks: If Time Machine is slow
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14169
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Brett L

External drives slow datarate

I have a G-Raid 4TB and a G-Drive. When I transfer data between them (to the G-Raid) it goes very slow. 1.6 took 10 hours. I don't know why.

I don't know all the details of your system's implenentation, but I've been fussing with Macs for over 25 years and am currently on an 8X 3.2GHz 2008 Mac Pro... this ain't gospel...
I believe that the FireWire controllers are dual channel and there are two of them. It makes sense to have both front port come reom the same controller, and if that true then you may be saturating the ports.
I could easily be wrong, but all it would take is to plug one of the drives into a back port (where it would be on a different controller) to see if things speed up. You'll probably want to unplug any other FW peripherals since speed is what you're after.
I sometimes use Activirty Monitor to get a feeling for real-world transfer speeds: I just click the Disk Activity button at the bottom and watch the little graph. Doing this before changing the cabling would give you a baseline speed, then you can compare.
Hope this helps

ITunes Slow Writing ID3 Tags From External Drive

When adding files (music) located on my WD External Hardrive, and upon trying to add the album art, the process slows down... a lot. As opposed to when I add filed on my internal hardrive (from my laptop directly), which is a lot faster (seconds whereas from the External takes about 2-3 minutes per album of 12-16 songs)
It takes FOREVER to write these ID3 tags. Is there a way to speed this up? What gives?

Sorry, where is the file iTunes Library.itl? If you're not certain and don't know how to find out use this script: iTunesXMLPath
External drives take longer to process file operations than internal drives. Every operation in iTunes causes the database to be updated so if this is on a sluggish drive you will notice.
May help to exclude the library & media folders from any anti-virus scans. iTunes also slows up as you increase the number of playlists and the size of the library.
Are you certain your computer is running USB 2.0? What happens if you power down the computer and remove all USB devices except keyboard, mouse and external drive? (Of course this might be your usual config.) Is iTunes any faster? Are you connected to the front USB ports or the rear? The drive should not be connected through an external USB hub.
tt2

MBP slow to boot and WILL NOT boot from external drive

I have two problems. First my friends MacBook Pro which is less than a month old is taking long to load. So I did a clean install without installing anything other than what came. Still slow to boot. Sometimes I see a light blue screen for a while before getting into the desktop. She complains of the beachball far too often. She says my MacBook is faster than her Pro, which is not right.
So I came down with my external LaCie drive, which I cloned from my iMac 24". I wasn't able to boot from the external (firewire) drive using her MacBook Pro. I thought my LaCie drive was bad or soemthing, but when I got home, I hooked it up to my MacBook and booted from the external drive just fine. I use SuperDuper to make a bootable clone.
So as it stands now, her computer is slow to boot into the OS, and it won't let me boot from my external drive. Does anyone have any idea what this could be? I did a clean install, used cocktail, etc. If it persists, I'll tell her to take it in.
Thanks,
Bryan

Robert,
I have no idea what you mean by Apple is not responsive to the issue. If you want help, please start a new topic thread so someone can help you identify the problem without the distraction of other people's problems around yours. Blaming people does not solve problems.
This is the link to post a new topic on this board:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1149&start=0
This is a user to user board. If you need help from Apple, call AppleCare directly here:
http://www.apple.com/contact/phone_contacts.html

Very slow to boot, even on an external drive

A friend's 15" MacBook Pro, quad core i7,(older, not sure of the exact model) very slow to boot, and boots with the progress bar, then when you try to log in, it goes back to the login page. Often it will not start. Starts after resetting SMC. Reset PRAM. Booted to the recovery disk, ran repair disk on drive, no errors, tried to run repair on the volume and the MBP shut down. Tried booting to an external drive and it boots to an empty desktop with a finder window like an extended desktop.Tried AHT, only the usual battery sensor error, 4SNS/1/40000000 TB3T-128.000. ran extended test, same thing, only the one error.
So, how to back up this MB Pro before I try an erase and install. (short of removing the drive) It would seem to be a hardware error, but always want to try an erase and install. Any ideas or troubleshooting suggestions?

Mike -- thanks for your input. I guess Windows is just a worrisome thing for us Mac guys. Part of what always gets me is unknown code that goes into Windows. I did a Google the other day to see if I could get a feel for the "roots" of the upcoming Vista.
Who knows what Vista is really based on -- a modification of NT that was in part based on DOS and VMS? From my limited experience, I am not sure there is enough shelf space to hold the manuals to run VMS successfully. Of course, why worry; Boot Camp and other things will change before Vista gets here.
The bottom line is that I will use all the Windows security fixes.
Mac Mini (Intel Core Duo) Mac OS X (10.4.5)

External drives cause program slow downs

To my early 2009 iMac, I have few external drives connected through USB and Firewire. During light disk use the hard drives spin down after awhile and go into saving enregy mode (sleep).
When doing normal functions like printing a Word doc or printing from TextEdit or working on some other programs, I get the spin wheel and programs pause until the sleepy drives wake up and pick up speed again.
The document(s) that I am working on are on the computer hard drive.
The external drives are contibuting nothing to the job on hand, why do they need to be awaken during this kind of processing and why do the programs need to wait for them?
Though I have Lion installed now, this used to happen with Snow Lepoard as well.
Thanks

Thanks for that info on your Mini's specs.
You have plenty of RAM reported, so I think we can rule out a bank of RAM disappearing and the Virtual Memory system being over-taxed to compensate.
You say "Now everything is slow again, when I turn the computer, it takes minutes to come up, and then I get the spinning ball whenever I try to do anything."
The spinning ball generally indicates that operating system is waiting for a "resource" to become available. Depending on how your Mini is/was setup vis-a-vis the external drives, some of your programs may be looking for stuff on external drives that are no longer available, or that are misfunctioning.
The "resource" that is being waited for, could also be a network resource, like an iDisk (if you have MobileMe) or a NAS (Network Attached Storage).
The wait for a "resource" could also be due to a hard drive starting to go bad, and the operating system needing repeated attempts to get data from it.
Apropos NAS, it has been reported iTunes 10 doesn't play well with data stored on non-Apple NASes.
Since you have an Intel Mini, it might also be useful to perform an SMC reset (DON'T do a PMU reset):
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964?viewlocale=en_US
+Resetting the SMC for Mac Pro, Intel-based iMac, Intel-based Mac mini, or Intel-based Xserve+
+1. Shut down the computer.+
+2. Unplug the computer's power cord.+
+3. Press and hold the power button for 5 seconds.+
+4. Release the power button.+
+5. Attach the computers power cable.+
+6. Press the power button to turn on the computer.+
Be sure to perform steps 4 and 5 in the correct order.

External drives copying slow

Both of my external drives have been copying at a snail's pace. My computer hasn't shown any other issues.
Both manually uploading files and the automatic Time Machine backups both take forever. They appear to be copying, but at an incredibly slow rate (20mb / hour). In fact, Time Machine hasn't been able to complete a backup since I erased/reformatted the drive last week. I've tried excluding Time Machine from Spotlight indexing.
Please let me know if you need more information. Any guidance would be much appreciated! My rig details are below:
COMPUTER
MacBook Pro
- OSX: 10.9.1 (Maverick)
- Processor: 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
- Memory: 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
DRIVES
1. Western Digital MyBook (3TB - 3.0 usb)
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2. Western Digital MyBookLive (3TB - ethernet)
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

I have a similar problem. I have a late 2013 MacBook Pro 13 inch with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. OS X Mavericks version 10.9.4 installed.
I am writing an ISO file to a USB flash drive using the dd command in a terminal window. When doing this against a Supersonic Magnum 12GB USB 3 flash drive I achieve around 800 KB/sec. System information confirms that the Magnum is connected at 5Gbit/sec. When monitoring the throughput with iostat I see this:
    4.00 559 2.18
    4.00 556 2.17
    4.00 556 2.17
    4.00 564 2.20
    4.00 560 2.19
    4.00 557 2.18
          disk2
    KB/t tps MB/s
    4.00 568 2.22
    4.00 385 1.51
    4.00 311 1.22
    4.00 312 1.22
    4.00 291 1.14
    4.00 306 1.19
    4.00 273 1.07
    4.00 255 1.00
    4.00 246 0.96
    4.00 238 0.93
    4.00 230 0.90
    4.00 170 0.66
    4.00 209 0.82
    4.00 165 0.64
    4.00 147 0.57
    4.00 122 0.48
    4.00 97 0.38
    4.00 103 0.40
    4.00 63 0.25
    4.00 65 0.25
          disk2
    KB/t tps MB/s
    4.00 50 0.20
    4.00 39 0.15
    4.00 31 0.12
When doing the same to a SanDisk 16GB USB 2 flash drive I get around 2.4 MB/sec - about 3 times faster than the USB 3 Magnum drive...
I am in the process of setting up a Windows 8.1 Boot Camp partition on the internal SSD. When finished I will test the same under Windows to see if it's better or worse.

Best strategy for using external drive to speed up painfully slow mac mini

I have Intel core duo, and LaCie external drive. Many programmes are almost unusably slow. Like Adobe Photoshop, Garageband, Logic Express, SecondLife etc... (would have been nice if apple had told me the 'improved spec' would mean so many programmes would no longer work!)
I am looking for the best way to utilise the external drive. I have now set up to boot from the LaCie, but it is no better. Id like to know whats best to do with the two drives. Would one be best kept as clear as possible? And should that be the bootup drive? Originally, the idea was to increase storage and backup. Now it is anything at all, that will make this computer faster. My old G4 PowerMac is actually faster and more reliable!
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

There is no way to improve on the graphics card in your mini - it's built into the logic board and can't be bypassed. However, while that may be a disappointment, it has to be said that by and large the graphics system in the mini is actually very capable, and is probably not the cause of the problem.
What IS the primary issue I suspect is the 512Mb RAM, which on a Core Solo running applications such as Photoshop is so woefully inadequate that it would be a surprise if your old G4 wasn't somewhat faster!
The problem is that Photoshop (the version you have) is not Intel-native, so while it runs, it requires Rosetta. Thus you have a RAM-hungry operating system, a RAM hungry application and a RAM-hungry translation package, all running at the same time. To add to that, since the software is not Intel-native, it has to be translated on-the-fly so considerable CPU time is needed to devote to that process in addition to all the other things the system needs to do in order to run.
Thus your external drive would not help much when used as a boot drive because even though it is likely to be somewhat faster than the internal, the limited RAM of the system will be forcing so many 'paging' actions (writing and reading memory blocks to the hard drive) that any speed gains will be rather heavily masked.
Most of the performance problems you experience can be resolved by upgrading RAM to 2Gb, simply because that will allow MacOS, Rosetta and your software a lot more room to breathe and significantly reduce the paging activity of the system such that then booting from the external will show notable improvements in responsiveness.
Alternatively, you may find that there are Intel-native alternatives to your software which may be available at reasonable cost and provide the features you need. Good examples are such things as GraphicConverter, which is shareware and does much of what Photoshop can do, and NeoOffice, which is open source and free, which is a good alternative to MS Office. These would run without Rosetta and provide you with much improved performance as a consequence.

Mac is really slow to read external drive

hello, i have a late 2012 mac book pro and a seagate 1tb paasport external drive.when i connect my drive to my computer sometimes it takes very long to read the drive right now its going on 5+ minutes and i still cant access my info.i have tested the harddrive on other computers and it boots up instantly or almost instantly.i have also noticced the slowness from time to time when i connect any type of flashdrive or cd wich again seem to work fine on any other device but tend to sometimes not boot up on my computer.is there any fix or possible way to speed up this process ? any recommendations? your help and or suggestions would be highly apprecciated since i do rely on this equipment for work.

Hey chezron,
If you are having slow down issues frequently, then check out the articles below to start with isolating what could be causing the issue. Sometime it could be an application or a process that is constantly running and causing slow down. Another thing could be the memory usage as well, for example if you are multitasking, then the memory may be full.
OS X Mountain Lion: If your Mac runs slowly
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10798
Runaway applications can shorten battery runtime, affect performance, and increase heat and fan activity
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203184
Take care,
-Norm G.

My coworker's external hard drive slowing down my computer

Hello,
I have a question. My coworker plugged in his external hard drive to my iMac with a USB, and he has to run its files everyday through network from his computer. The reason he does this is because his old iMac cannot read his newly formate external hard drive. I feel like my computer is slowing down. Is what he's doing slowing down my computer? Is there a way to not let the external drive using my CPU or memory? Is there a way to set it to low priority?
Thanks.

Since your current editing workflow is based around Virtual Copies there are no actual files containing the edit data. Therefore, you'll need to use the 'Import from another catalog' option ( see File menu).

Time Capsule external drive very slow for backup

I am experiencing very, very slow backup times using an external drive attached to my Time Capsule. When I recently added a 3 TB Rocstor external drive to my mid-2011 iMac using FireWire, I included it in the drives to be backed up. The internal 2 TB of storage in my Time Capsule was no longer enough, so I plugged a 4 TB WD My Book Studio drive into the Time Capsule's USB 2.0 port and specified this WD drive as the only backup storage. The first backup took almost 48 hours. Now the Time Machine keeps trying to back up about 400 GB - 500 GB (though there haven't been any changes) and is transferring about 400 KB/sec over Ethernet from my iMac to the Time Capsule's external drive. What am I doing wrong? (I recently upgraded the iMac to OS X 10.10.2 Yosemite.)

Frankly, I have no way to gauge your network setup, so I can't really tell you what you should expect. I can tell you from my own experiences using a local network based on a 3rd Gen. Gigabit Ethernet AEBS that using Ethernet the average throughput (not interface) was in the neighborhood of 16-20 MBs/sec. The average throughput for a USB 2.0 drive connected directly was about the same.
This works out to an average throughput of around 60 GBs/hour. Depending upon file sizes and number of files being transferred a USB 2.0 drive might reach 100 GBs/hour, but that is a rare outcome. The USB 2.0 drive interface speed is about the same as FireWire 400 - 400 Mb/s or roughly 50 MBs/sec. This is what I know from measurement. Do not expect Ethernet to be any faster for throughput.

External Lacie firewire drive slow access

Around 3 or 4 weeks ago, for seemingly no reason, the 250gb external firewire Lacie d2 drive attached to my PB started running slowly.
To give a bit more detail and example: I run iTunes off the drive and it runs fine. BUT, on most occasions, when I doubleclick the drive icon to open it, I get the beachball of doom spinning away for at least 30-40 seconds before it opens the window - the music playing then cuts out while it's accessing. Not what I expect from a firewire drive. I also hear the little beep from the drive quite often when it's trying to access.
It's getting silly. Although it will quite happily play music on shuffle for the entire evening without cutting, as soon as I try and use the drive like you would any drive (ie. navigating through files and folders), it does the beachball for 30-40 seconds thing every couple of windows. It's made it virtually unusable for everyday working (in the way that I'm going to throw it out the window if it carries on).
I can't remember if it started happening after the 10.4.7 update... I didn't do anything different to cause it, so am perplexed. Haven't tried Lacie forums yet either.
Any ideas, people?

I've now read that adding external drives to the privacy window in spotlight is a bad move. Besides, I need to find stuff and shouldn't have to turn it off (I always thought that after the initial spotlight indexing at first installation, it would just update rather than re-index the whole drive, so it shouldn't be that slow anyways... right?)
So, I've run diskwarrior, and it's optimized. Still the problem persists. LaCie tell me I have to update the firmware, but I'm a bit worried at the risk this poses to the data on the drive (ie. a sh*tload of music among other stuff). I have nowhere to put the 100gb on the drive, as I'm running a PB with a 60gig internal.
Risks?

External drive slow

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