External harddrive is slow

Hello there
I have a MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz with Mac OS X 10.5.4, and Im experiencing slow data transfers from my Western Digital My Book 500gb external harddrive. This results in video-lag when trying to play dvd or other video files from that harddrive. I have searched forums for help on this, but cannot find any solutions. Do you know what I can do to fix this? By the way, the filesystem is ntfs-3g.

I don't believe it is a fragmentation problem. It is extremely unlikely that a drive used to store large video files would become fragmented enough to cause your problem. It sounds as if your computer is not recognizing your drive as USB2.0 and is mounting it as a USB1.1 drive. The issue is addressed in this thread, unfortunately there is no permanent solution as of yet. Some have reported that unmounting, disconnecting, and reconnecting the drive fixes the problem temporarily.
Good Luck!
-Cliff

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