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.

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?? external drives/copy large folder issue ??

Hola;
I am trying to copy my large iTunes library from a 1T Seagate [desktop model]to a new 1T WD drive [portable model]. Both drives are Mac Os Extended (journaled) and verified.
First: I created a new small library on the WD and used "add to library" to bring my songs over from the Seagate. This started out OK, but hung about 3/4 of the way through, and I had to force quit, and restart. Second attempt, same method gave me the same result.
Second: Leaving iTunes out of the process, I dragged my music folder from Seagate to WD, and all went well for the first 3 hours and then it hung. More force quitting and restarting. Second attempt with this method gave the same result. First time I left it overnight and woke up to the failure, second time I kept an eye on it, but no better luck.
The WD was preformatted for Windows, so I used Disk Utility to format it. I used Disk Utility to erase the WD each time before I tried to move so space should not be an issue.
Any ideas on what might be wrong here and how I can get this proces completed are very much appreciated.
Macbook Pro, Mac OS X 10.6.8, Snow Leopard.
Thanks.

Yes, your target drive is experiencing bad sectors and/or your files your attempting to copy are corrupted in some fashion.
Do this to the external drive, either whole (no data on it or it's backed up to another drive) or Free Space, (just does the empty space)
Reducing bad sectors effect on hard drives
Once that is done to the external drive, attempt your copy again, if it goes through your problems are resolved.
If not, your going to have to copy in portions via the iTunes individual music folders (inside the iTunes folder) until you recieve the "hang" again to identify which files or folder of files is responsible.
The data that is attempting to be copied by the hardware is likely on a failed sector on the original drive, you'll have to revert this file or folder of files from a backup or likely delete it if it fails to copy over.
Hard drives are fragile, so don't move them while they are in operation as the heads strike the platters and can cause issues like this, however sectors can fail later with data on them all on their own.

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.

Does importing files from an external drive copy them to my internal drive?

Hi,
I'm a PSE newbie and this is my first post here. I have a question about importing files. I store all my pictures on an external drive. Does importing the files copy them to the Adobe folder? If yes, can I now work on a picture even if the external drive is disconnected?
Will I get an email notification when someone answers my question?
Thanks.

Hello dj_paige,
Thanks for your reply. I did get an email notification.
I've discovered that the photo files are actually copied over to the Pictures folder. Why do I need to keep my external drive connected when working on a file then?

Have an external drive copy exactly a folder on my Time Capsule

Hello all.
I have a Time Capsul on which I keep large folders of video content. The content on this folder changes weekly -- files added, files deleted. I keep another external hard drive as an emergency backup for this video folder, and I want to know if there is a way to have this external drive mirror what is in the Time Capsule's folder, without my usual: Delete eerything out of the external folder, copy+paste all the files for the TC. This takes a very long time.
Understand it is not as simple as just adding the newere files becuse files get deleted out fo the folder also and I want to folders to be mirror images of each other.
If anyone knows a way to set this up to happen, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I want to know if there is a way to have this external drive mirror what is in the Time Capsule's folder
Chronosync or Carbon Copy Cloner can be setup to automatically back up the file(s) from the Time Capsule to your other external drive automatically on a daily basis.
Once you have made the initial backup, then the application that you use will only back up the changes that have been made since the last backup, so these "incremental" backups should occur quickly each day.
ChronoSync | Schedule File and Folder Synchronizations and ...
Carbon Copy Cloner

USB 3.0 external drive extremely slow on Macbook Air 2014

Dear Apple Support Team & Folks in Apple Community,
Seriously, I have a problem with my new Macbook Air 2014 which has equipped with USB 3.0 port. I read through the forum and hardly find a solution for this.
Recently, I plugged in my USB 3.0 external drive and expect that it would reach the same file transfer speed as that on my PC. Instead of 625 MB/s (5 Gbit/s), it was hardly reaching 60 MB/s (480 Mbit/s) to my surprise! Sounds like Macbook Air doesn't recognize USB 3.0 device properly. I have tried Western Digital and Seagate devices but failed to get reasonable transfer speed on my Macbook Air.
I tried it again with my USB 2.0 external drive on Macbook Air and only got the transfer speed around 15 - 20 MB/s which is disappointing.
Any patches or Firmware updates would be appreciate!
I have OS X 10.9.3 already with EFI and SMC update patched by App Store.

I would be interested to know which consumer grade non-raid external harddisk that could reach 6xx mb/sec.
The speed you mentioned should be normal, since most of these are 5400rpm drives (asumming it is 2.5 inch).

New external drive: Copy existing masters onto it?

This is a hard drive setup question.
Current setup:
2013 iMac27 with SSD.
Aperture on internal. All masters are referenced on an external 1TB USB2 drive.
Backup 1 is on a 3TB external using Time Machine
Backup 2 is on CrashPlan cloud
This has been working well for a while. But my external 1TB where all my masters are only has 100GB left so I bought a new WD 3TB USB3 external.
My question is: Would it be best to copy my whole Referenced Master folder to the new 3TB and just retire the current 1TB (therefore giving me an extra backup in the process)? The downside of that is that when I add that new drive to my CrashPlan list of things to backup, it might think it has to re-upload my entire Referenced Master fold which will take at least a month.
Or should I keep the current 1TB online and create a second referenced masters folder on the new drive.
I don't really like the idea of keeping one extra drive running at all times so the first solution is my preferred one at this point. I am just a little concerned about the time it is going to take to re-backup a large masters folder even though it is the same one that just got copied over.
If it makes any difference, I expect that I will (reluctantly) switch to Lightroom in the next 6-12 months since that is where most of my clients are heading.
Any thoughts for you experts out there?
Thank you very much for any help.
Bo

Hi Bo. Select the built-in container "Photos" from near the top of the Library Inspector. This will show you all your Images when you set the Browser filter to "Show All". Then select all. (Easily done with the key-chord "⌘a", but also available on the Edit menu.)
Speaking generally, but with experience: all personal computer operations are done using a "noun-verb" syntax (you select the objects, and then issue a command). I think this grew out of RPN, but I don't know. Using our example: you first select "Photos" then issue the command "Edit ▹ Select all". You do this so you end up with all Images selected, so you can run the command "File ▹ Relocate Originals ... " on all the Images in the Library.
The relationship between an Image and the location of its Original is independent of the location of the Image in your Library. Moving an Image to another location (another Project), or adding it to an Album, or moving the Project it is in or any Album it is in to another Folder, does not move or any way alter the relationship between the Image and its Original.
In short, your Library structure of Projects, Albums, and Folders will be unaltered by using "File ▹ Relocate Originals ... ". (Though, of course, the contents of any Smart Albums that use the rule "File Status" will be changed if you use either of the arguments "Managed" or "Referenced", and may be changed when you use some of the other arguments.)
Aperture allows you to relocate _any_ Image's Original at any time. There is no need I know of to relocate them often, but if you had that need, you could.
For many thousands of files, expect "File ▹ Relocate Originals ... " to take hours to complete. Aperture will show you a progress bar at the top of the Browser. IME, this is usefully accurate.
Let us know how it goes.
—Kirby.
(Cross-posted with Léonie's answer. .)

PC External Hard Drive is Slowing my System Down

Just switched to Mac this weekend and I put all my PC files and music on my External backup drive and plugged that into my new iMac via USB 2.0). No problem seeing the files and dragging them into the iMac but the external drive is slowing my whole system down! Every time I do an action it starts humming away. Check mail? I searches the external. Turn on MS Word, checks external. Never got that pinwheel thing until this morning. I ejected the hard drive and all is right with the world. But I need that drive for occasional back up and what not. Any help would be appreciated.

I discovered it was a problem when I noticed that doing a simple spotlight search was causing my external drive to start humming. So I just checked into the preferences. However, it still starts running when I open iMovie and some other programs, but I'm sure there's a setting to shut that off too. However, if I want to make a backup of a file, I now have to literally drag it to the desktop and THEN move it into the external. I'm sure there's a better fix.

Back up - large files - external USB drive - copy failure

Just the facts:
I cannot backup my Music folder to an external USB FAT32 drive. I have no large single files over the FAT32 limit of 4GB. The copy process stops at various amounts progess: 500MB to 6GB. My Music folder is ~16GB total in size. I recently did a clean install from Tiger. I had no issues moving my 14GB Music folder in Tiger to this same external drive.
1) Has anyone solved this?
2) Has anyone talked to Apple support in a store or over the phone on this?
3) Anyway to highlight a (likely) important issue with Leopard to the Apple folks?
There are numerous posts all dealing with moving/copying large files. Seems to be a common issue to Time Machine, iDisk, external drives, copying large folders to Desktop, and others.
Cheers,
MostlyHarmless
PS New Mac user and really like it so far. I realize these are just Leopard "birth pains."

This is the Windows forum, not the Mac forum.
But it's the same. Simply drag the iTunes folder to the external drive.
Or use a backup prgroam such as SuperDuper!
You do have a bootable backup of your internal HD, correct?

Moving my iTunes to an external drive

I would like to free up space in my macbook pro. I have followed the procedure as outlined for moving the iTunes music library to an external drive i.e.. changing the preferences to point to the external drive, copying the iTunes folder to the external drive, consolidating, etc. However, even if I choose the library in the external drive iTunes would not play the songs. (I also have my library synced with iCloud and so when I turn wifi off I am not able to play any tunes so I figured the way it was running was thru the cloud not thru the copied file). Thanks for the help.
The hard drive I am using is a Porsche design Lacie using a USB 3.0 link.

Our iTunes guru Terence Devlin advises the following:
1. Quit iTunes
2. Drag the iTunes folder from your internal hd - located in ~/Music folder - to your external hd (which has to be formatted as HFS Extended (Journaled)). DO NOT delete the original one from your internal hd... yet!
3. When the transfer is complete, press and hold the Option(alt) key and fire up iTunes.
4. A "Choose iTunes Library" window will come up. Click on the "Choose Library" button.
5. Navigate to where the iTunes folder is located in the external hd.
6. Within the iTunes folder, select the iTunes Library file and click Choose...
That's it. iTunes will now display all your playlists, songs, movies, podcasts etc. At this point, should you wish, you can delete the iTunes folder from the internal hd to free up space.
More info:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751
Or if you prefer a more complicated explanation:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to -a-new-hard-drive

How do I reconnect to an external drive with all my itunes

Today I migrated to an Imac and have successfully updated iphoto but itunes isn't working.
My G4 has a faulty logic board so I upgraded before the inevitable.
I have always kept my music on an external drive (500GB with 375GB available space)
I have followed all the postings on this forum and have
• changed the location in Preferences/advanced to the correct folder on the external drive
• copied and pasted the contents of the Itunes folder on the internal HD (not the folder just the contents)
iTunes Library Extras.itdb (12KB)
iTunes library Genius.itdb (28KB)
iTunes Music (which is empty)
iTunes Music Library.xml (12KB)
Previous iTunes Library (iTunes Library 2008-09-26 36KB)
• restarted itunes holding down the option & shift so that I get prompted to select a library
• choose "Previous itunes library" from the external drive
• deleted the contents only from the original music/itunes folder
• had a quick restart and nothing !
Can someone please guide me through it. Just a reminder that there is no music on the internal drive. All 23GB is on the external drive.
Blue skies
Dean

Are you using iTunes 8? After my update to iTunes 8, my Western Digital 500 GB My Book which stores my music library, is recognized in iTunes, but if I don't play any music or videos within a few minutes, and try to play shortly thereafter, it is nothing but a spinning beach ball. I must shut down the drive and and remount it. It does drive scan and then mounts allowing me to play music again.
I believe iTunes 8 has issues with external drives (FireWire only?) in some cases and is causing issues with the library readability and drive powering.
Have you tried a completely different drive with the same data? Not the easiest option, but It sounds as if you've followed all the right steps so far.
Message was edited by: Chad Kerychuk

Can I put my startup/home folder on an external drive?

I would like to stripe my four internal drives for a high-performance RAID 0 for video editing.
Is there ANY reason that it would be unwise to put my applications/library/system/users folders on an external firewire drive? (Of course I will continue to do regular backups of these folders, regardless of where they live.)
Any performance issues, startup issues, etc, that I should be aware of?

External drives are slower than internal drives but otherwise there's no reason you could not do it. I would not recommend it. I would leave one internal drive as your startup drive and stripe the other three. This would be the faster and more reliable alternative in my opinion.
Consider putting in a goodly amount of RAM which will also help with video work and limit the amount of disk usage during editing of large files.

Itunes can't locate songs stored in external drive

i had created playlists and added songs to the playlists in itunes 7.02. these songs are stored on an external drive. i did not sync my ipod immediately but tried it a few days later. despite the external drive being connected to my laptop, when i tried to sync the ipod with itunes, for 90% of the songs there was an exclamation mark next to the song & i had to manually double click on a song name in itunes, and locate it in the external drive, in order for itunes to be able to sync it.
i can't do that for 3000+ songs. why can't itunes recognise and locate these songs when they have been stored in the itunes library from the external drive? isn't there a way to tell itunes to locate songs in the external drive? especially when they had been added from there in the first place?

Hi there,
I'm having the same problem, I'll list it in case I'm somehow different from the other case but unfortunately directing iTunes to that folder doesn't seem to do the trick...?
Have bought a Seagate 320GB external drive, copied my iTunes library (that was located in my /Users/Shared folder) to a new location on my external drive and redirected iTunes to the new location. It said it was updating the folder which took a while and I assumed was a good sign due to my 8948 songs but alas the dreaded exclamation mark has appeared next to every track. If I redirect one to the new location it works fine but f*ed if I'm gonna do that for the other 8947. If I quit iTunes and reopen it, it's still directed to the same correct place and the previously located still works but the rest don't. Is there a) some reason this may not be working correctly; or b) a quick way to redirect every song to their location? Thanks so much for your help.

Copying files from an external HD extremely slow!

Hi everybody.
Thank’s to read this message.
I’ve a MacBook Pro 13” (mid 2009) core2duo 2.26 Mhz whit 2GB ram and running Snow Leopard 10.6.2
The system runs perfect until i try to copy something from an external drive, takes a lot of time to copy it, for example a 600 mb file takes almost 15 minutes, thats ridiculous, the problem is only when the info comes from an external drive and not from the machine to an external drive.
I’ve tried whit tree different external HD and cables, whit four different USB flash memories, happened the same whit the SD slot and whit the CD drive, the size of the files or the content doesn’t matter is slow whit anything, I thought in the external drives format (FAT32 most of them) but happened the same whit the Time Machine disk whit HFS+ format, yesterday i copy a 4.5 GB folder whit videos and photos from time machine HD and took 4, yes 4 hours!!
Is a serious problem because while is copying a file uses all the machine resources and i can’t do anything else until finish writing the file. Also i think is not an Snow Leopard problem, cause i tried to install Windows XP whit Bootcamp and in the part when the system copy files from the CD to the HDD happened the same, just took extremely lot of time and i had cancel it.
I already reset the PRAM, repaired the hard disc and made a test whit the Hardware test tool in the Snow Leopard disc but can’t find something wrong.
Well, thats the problem, any idea or comment is appreciate, thanks a lot

Hi Eww, thanks a lot for your answer
Thats a good idea, but why happens the same when i'm out of Snow Leopard, i mean installing windows xp goes very slow.
I think should be something that controls the in and out information flow, but i don't know.
Any other idea??

Problem with copying to external drives 10.8.3 "the operation can't be completed because an item with the name .ds_store exists"

After upgrading from 10.7.5 to 10.8.3 I cannot copy certain folders to any external drive. the operation can't be completed because an item with the name .ds_store exists. I have seen this problem in discussions for many years with no real solution. Does anyone have a resolution? Please help. This is very frustrating as I work in two locations and copy folders back in forth all the time.

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It’s unlikely to solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of the test is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party software that loads automatically at startup or login, or by a peripheral device.
Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards. Boot in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. Note: If FileVault is enabled, or if a firmware password is set, or if the boot volume is a software RAID, you can’t do this. Ask for further instructions.
Safe mode is much slower to boot and run than normal, and some things won’t work at all, including Wi-Fi on certain iMacs. The next normal boot may also be somewhat slow.
The login screen appears even if you usually log in automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin. Test while in safe mode. Same problem? After testing, reboot as usual (i.e., not in safe mode) and verify that you still have the problem. Post the results of the test.

External drives copying slow

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