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.

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My WD elements external hard drive has slowed down so much since upgrading - PLEASE HELP ME!!!

I am in external hard drive **** - someone please help!
I use my external hard drive as my music drive, and since upgrading to mountain lion something has gone wrong, and I have no idea what.
Basically it is incredibly slow at everything - appearing in finder, showing its contents, and copying from or to it. This is a problem that has only happened since my upgrade. I have tried to verify and repair it, but each time this happens it simply tells me every thing is OK! The only message I get is
'Updating boot support partitions as required.'
But this happens each time! I have no idea what this means (i am happy in my ignorance about computers most of the time)
I dont think that there is a problem with my hard drive, because I have seen the speed of my USB memory stick reduce in this time too, and if I leave it connected for long enough, it eventually finds all my files and folders and I can use them just fine. Its as if my USB ports speeds have all degraded very fast, for no particular reason. It has to be something to do with mountain lion...
Anyway, any ideas guys and gals? Please help me!

Basically I thought that mackeeper would keep everything nice and clean...
That's what the con-artist developer wants you to think, and it's the exact opposite of the truth.
How to maintain a Mac
1. Make redundant backups, keeping at least one off site at all times. One backup is not enough. Don’t back up your backups; make them independent of each other. Don’t rely completely on any single backup method, such as Time Machine. If you get an indication that a backup has failed, don't ignore it.
2. Keep your software up to date. In the Software Update preference pane, you can configure automatic notifications of updates to OS X and other Mac App Store products. Some third-party applications from other sources have a similar feature, if you don’t mind letting them phone home. Otherwise you have to check yourself on a regular basis. This is especially important for complex software that modifies the operating system, such as device drivers. Before installing any Apple update, you must check that all such modifications that you use are compatible.
3. Don't install crapware, such as “themes,” "haxies," “add-ons,” “toolbars,” “enhancers," “optimizers,” “accelerators,” “extenders,” “cleaners,” “defragmenters,” “firewalls,” "barriers," “guardians,” “defenders,” “protectors,” most “plugins,” commercial "virus scanners,” "disk tools," or "utilities." With very few exceptions, this kind of material is useless, or worse than useless.
The more actively promoted the product, the more likely it is to be garbage. The most extreme example is the “MacKeeper” scam.
As a rule, the only software you should install is that which directly enables you to do the things you use a computer for — such as creating, communicating, and playing — and does not modify the way other software works. Never install any third-party software unless you know how to uninstall it.
The free anti-malware application ClamXav is not crap, and although it’s not routinely needed, it may be useful in some environments, such as a mixed Mac-Windows enterprise network.
4. Beware of trojans. A trojan is malicious software (“malware”) that the user is duped into installing voluntarily. Such attacks were rare on the Mac platform until sometime in 2011, but are now increasingly common, and increasingly dangerous.
There is some built-in protection against downloading malware, but you can’t rely on it — the attackers are always at least one day ahead of the defense. You can’t rely on third-party protection either. What you can rely on is common-sense awareness — not paranoia, which only makes you more vulnerable.
Never install software from an untrustworthy or unknown source. If in doubt, do some research. Any website that prompts you to install a “codec” or “plugin” that comes from the same site, or an unknown site, is untrustworthy. Software with a corporate brand, such as Adobe Flash Player, must be acquired directly from the developer. No intermediary is acceptable, and don’t trust links unless you know how to parse them. Any file that is automatically downloaded from a web page without your having requested it should go straight into the Trash. A website that claims you have a “virus,” or that anything else is wrong with your computer, is rogue.
Because of recurring security issues in Java, it’s best to disable it in your web browsers, if it’s installed. Few websites have Java content nowadays, so you won’t be missing much. This action is mandatory if you’re running any version of OS X older than 10.6.8 with the latest Java update. Note: Java has nothing to do with JavaScript, despite the similar names. Don't install Java unless you're sure you need it. Most users don't.
5. Don't fill up your boot volume. A common mistake is adding more and more large files to your home folder until you start to get warnings that you're out of space, which may be followed in short order by a boot failure. This is more prone to happen on the newer Mac notebooks that come with an internal SSD instead of the traditional hard drive. The drive can be very nearly full before you become aware of the problem. While it's not true that you should or must keep any particular percentage of space free, you should monitor your storage consumption and make sure you're not in immediate danger of using it up. According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of free space on the startup volume for normal operation.
Use a tool such as the free application OmniDiskSweeper to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the most space. Move rarely-used large files to secondary storage.
6. Relax, don’t do it. Besides the above, no routine maintenance is necessary or beneficial for the vast majority of users; specifically not “cleaning caches,” “zapping the PRAM,” "resetting the SMC," “rebuilding the directory,” “running periodic scripts,” “deleting log files,” “scanning for viruses,” or “repairing permissions.” Such measures are for solving problems as they arise, not for maintenance.
The very height of futility is running an expensive third-party application called “Disk Warrior” when nothing is wrong, or even when something is wrong and you have backups, which you must have. Disk Warrior is a data-salvage tool, not a maintenance tool, and you will never need it if your backups are adequate. Don’t waste money on it or anything like it.

2 external hard drives not recognize by system all of a sudden

I have 2 external hard drives, one was used as a backup with Time Machine, the other was all my music storage, including Logic Pro and Ableton files.
This afernoon I was working on my Macbook pro with no problems, system backed up a few times. I was working on a new project in Logic. I saved the file, disconnected hard drive, went to my 2nd computer, an Imac from late 2009, plug the hard drive in, system does not recognize it. I wait a few minutes then unplug the drive, upon doing that I get a message that I've never seen before:
"Because a USB device was drawing too much power from your computer, one or more of your USB devices has been disabled.
To prevent damaging your computer, the USB device drawing too much power has been disabled. Other devices may have also been disabled. When you disconnect the device drawing too much power, your other USB devices will be enabled again."
It's been a few hours, I've disconnected all the devices, I think I figured that one of the drives is faulty. My question is, why is the other hard drive not being recognized, it's not recognized on any of my 3 computers, 2 Macbook Pro's and one imac.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is extremely frustrating.

Try this:
Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)
If it doesn't help, make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store to have the machine tested.

I have an older MacBook Pro using 10.4.11 and want to use new operating system to use the latest iLife. Can i install 10.7 on an external hard drive and use the external hard drive to run new system while leaving my old system intact?

I want to use a new version of iLife (for iMovie and iDVD) but am currently running OS 10.4.11, which won't work with the newer iLife programs. Can i install OS 10.6.3 or 10.7 on an external hard drive, boot to that hard drive and work with the new software (installed on the external hard drive) using my MacBook Pro (circa 2005/6) as the engine while leaving my laptop running 104.11 the rest of the time?

Yes, you can use an external drive. To upgrade, however, means:
Purchase Snow Leopard DVD then update Snow Leopard to 10.6.8.
Access the App Store with your Apple ID and purchase and download Lion.
Your computer must meet system requirements:
Snow Leopard General requirements
Mac computer with an Intel processor
1GB of memory
5GB of available disk space
DVD drive for installation
Some features require a compatible Internet service provider; fees may apply.
Some features require Apple’s MobileMe service; fees and terms apply.
Lion System Requirements
Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor
2GB of memory
OS X v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 recommended)
7GB of available space
Some features require an Apple ID; terms apply.
Obviously, you do not have to upgrade to Lion but can stop at Snow Leopard 10.6.8 which is sufficient for the current versions of iLife apps. Note that iDVD is no longer part of the newest version of iLife. Lion 10.7.2 or later is needed should you wish to use iCloud.

HELP!: How to read and write to External hard drives? What file system to use?

hey all, this has been really frustrating for me today. i want to be able to write to an external HDD that's formatted in NTFS. today i find out it isn't possible to write to this file system on a Mac and that on FAT32 it is possible. however, FAT32 can't address files larger than 4GB so this hurts me a lot. are there any other file systems that'll allow me to read and write from a Mac? my goal was to use freeNAS to build a NAS with an old tower and connect my external hard drives to it, but if i can't write to them this may not be possible.
thanks guys, i'd appreciate any help!

Read this, you don't need to install any software unless you have no choice.
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3044
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

Copying data to time capsule from external hard drive too slow....

is there a way to make the transfer of data from a external hard drive that is plugged into the time capsule, transfer faster?
im transfering 11gb and it says it will take 3 hours to complete.
there must be a faster way to transfer all my data, in less time?
thanks,

If you are copying any important information to the TC directly (example: iTunes library, iPhoto library, Movies), please make sure that you implement a backup solution for these files. The Airport Utility has an Archive function which will backup the entire TC to an externally attached USB drive.
For faster data transfer, you could try connecting your Mac to the TC with Gb Ethernet and than attach the external USB drive to your Mac. I would expect a Mac connected drive to transfer faster to the TC (faster than a USB drive connected to the TC) as the Mac has much more memory and compute power.
You could connect the drive to your Mac and observe the transfer rate before waiting 3 hours on the other configuration.

External Hard drives spooling after display power down

When I shut off my MBP thats connected to a 27" thunderbolt display, the external hard drives that I've got connected to the display shut down, then spool back up after everything has been shut down. How can I get them to stay off?
Current set up: MBP-Thunderbolt display-USB hub-2 external drives
Thank you!

I decided to try KeepDriveSpinning for my issue and I found that 30 sec was the optimal time to stop my drive spinning up/down. I tried 35 sec and up to 60 and the issue kept occuring. You could try a different time setting if you haven't already.
It does sound like Mountain Lion is the issue in your case.
Sorry, I don't really have the technical skills to help you. I'm really just fumbling around.
On a related point I think my external drive is also the cause of my mac not automatically sleeping. I came across acommand that lists the things that are preventing the mac form sleeping. Maybe, [thats a big maybe], the command might help you with your issue
pmset -g assertions
and there is a related command that continually logs the things that prevent sleep
pmset -g assertionslog
If you ran the logging one and then slept the screen and tired accessing your drives it might log something that may help??? Its a long shot though.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120701234338952

Logic error-hard drive too slow or system overload (new macbook!)

have made a few short tracks with logic with no probs. when i have tried to play the demo songs which have many tracks, i get an error msg saying hd too slow or system overload. i have a new macbook, 2.4, 2mb ram, 250 gb hd (with loads space left). airport turned off when using logic. what gives???

Samples that I am using are located on a 7200 external HD.
Is your external formatted for Mac? If you didn't buy it from a store that sells mac drives specifically, it's probably formatted for windows. You must reformat for Mac or you'll have a lot of performance issues.
I've a Macbook 2,2 Ghz Core 2 DUO with 2Go of RAM.
You should get more Ram, it's really cheap these days.
Airport is disconnected. My AUdio Buffer is 1024 in the Logic preferences.
Make sure the I/O Safety Buffer is OFF, and then set the buffer size at 256 or 512.

How do I stop external hard drives from slowing my macpro

I have a Mac pro (OSX 10.6.7) with two internal drives and two external drives (Lacie and Western Digital). The external drives are used exclusily for once a day backup using super dooper. When they are mounted my machine seriously slows down. I can unmount them during the day and remount them at the end of the day to get around this but it is a big inconvience. What should I do to keep them running all day with no slow down. I have ran disk utility, Onyx, and tech tools (not the latest version). I forgot which but one one of them only checked the internal drives.

Don't use USB for one. Turn them off until you run SuperDuper.
Switch to native SATA interface and controller.
Disable spotlight on them too. Or try deleting the index and database.
Green WD drives have been known to 'fall off the chain" or appear to not be mounted, or act like they are in sleep mode at times, and not work well with TimeMachine.
I like to keep one backup set off line while the other backup set is being updated. But you may want to use your 4 internal drive bays too.

Need Help with External Hard drives and too much music

I am not terribly tech-savvy, and I need your help. I have a G5 PPC dual processor with an internal 250GB drive. I have two seagate firewire/USB2 external hard drives. One is 250GB and one is 350GB. I want to know how to use them to get my Mac to run faster and better.
My original hard drive is 7GB shy of being full. Almost half of this is my itunes library which is over 100GB. The older (250GB) hard drive has about 150GB of photos/videos.
My Mac is running slow as molasses and when I power up the external hard drives it slows down to what I recall my original Mac Plus ran like.
I use the G5 primarily to work with photos, illustrations and creating the occasional DVD with video and photos. the apps I use most often are Photoshop, Illustrator and Painter. I always listen to music while work.
I hope all of this information is helpful! Here is my question:
What is the best way for me to set up and use these external hard drives to return my G5 to its original blazing (to me) fast speed?
PPC G5 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

I think you should look at adding two 500GB internal drives. I'd say Maxtor MaxLine Pro for cost, but they also run much warmer (43ºC even when nearly doing zilch) so I'd go with WD RE2 500GB for $40 ea. more.
dump whatever you don't need, trash anything that is hogging space and is just temp file or useless cache. Web browsers can leave behind a ton of small files eating up tens of MBs.
Use SuperDuper to backup/clone your drive.
Disk Warrior 4 to repair (after it gets to 15% free, or just forget for now).
A 250GB drive formats to 240GB and you have ~3% free it looks like.
For every data drive plan to have two backup drives.
Keep your boot drive to 40% used.
And your data drive to 60%.
Backups can go a little higher.
Drives are cheap and inexpensive, especially for the space and performance. And they have improved SATA over the years it has been out.
By doing a backup followed by erasing your drive, and then restoring it, using SuperDuper, which optimizes the organization, skips copying temp files that aren't needed, it also defragments your files. I would do backup daily to different sets that you "rotate." And before any OS update. And do the erase and restore probably every 2 months.
Make sure you keep one drive partition somewhere that is just your disk utility emergency boot drive that is not a copy of working system, used for doing repairs like running Disk Warrior and Disk Utility.
You may need to repair; backup; even erase and restore your external drives. Rather than spend on vendor made case, just pick up a good FireWire case either with drive, or bare (and add your own). I think it'd add 500GB FW drive though.
Why?
To begin backup of your current drive. To leave your other FW drives "as is" for now.
Then install a new internal 500GB drive as well so you now have a good current backup, and you have moved your data off 250GB to 500GB. If anything happens, you have one off line FW backup.
Then begin to clean up, organize, and get your FW drives working. It sure sounds like they have had some directory or file problems.
You can find a lot of Firewire and SATA drive choices over at OWC:
http://www.macsales.com/firewire/

HELP: I can no longer add users to my external hard drives

Sorry for the duplicate, someone hacked my other account.
So here's the skinny, I was following some instructions on here to remove the "unknown user" from the list of users that was attached to my Hard Drives.
Path: System Preferences/Users and Groups/Login Options/Join/Open Directory Utility/Directory Editor.
Under Users from the pulldown I deleted "Unkown User" Now I am unable to add users to any of my external hard drives via Sharing under System preferences. When I click the + it will let me select a user, but when I click the select button it will not add that user to the list. It remains blank.
I've tried reformatting one of the hard drives, and a re-boot. Still am unalbe to add users.
Please help!

here is a copy of the disc utility log....laila is the name of the extrenal hd i was able to use successfully last.
2012-07-04 08:10:34 -0400: Disk Utility started.
2012-07-04 08:17:58 -0400: Preparing to erase : “LAILA”
2012-07-04 08:17:58 -0400:           Partition Scheme: Master Boot Record
2012-07-04 08:17:58 -0400:           1 volume will be created
2012-07-04 08:17:58 -0400:                     Name                    : “LAILA”
2012-07-04 08:17:58 -0400:                     Size                    : 160.04 GB
2012-07-04 08:17:58 -0400:                     File system          : MS-DOS (FAT)
2012-07-04 08:17:59 -0400: Unmounting disk
2012-07-04 08:18:02 -0400: Creating the partition map
2012-07-04 08:18:03 -0400: Waiting for the disks to reappear
2012-07-04 08:18:03 -0400: Formatting disk3s1 as MS-DOS (FAT) with name LAILA
2012-07-04 08:18:04 -0400: 512 bytes per physical sector
/dev/rdisk3s1: 312505472 sectors in 4882898 FAT32 clusters (32768 bytes/cluster)
bps=512 spc=64 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf8 spt=32 hds=255 hid=2 drv=0x80 bsec=312581806 bspf=38148 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6
2012-07-04 08:18:04 -0400: Mounting disk
2012-07-04 08:18:06 -0400: Erase complete.
2012-07-04 08:18:06 -0400:
2012-07-11 15:48:08 -0400: Disk Utility started.
2012-07-11 15:48:42 -0400: Eject of “Unattached Disk Image” succeeded
2012-07-11 15:48:42 -0400: Eject of “Flash Player” failed
2012-07-11 15:59:10 -0400: Disk Utility started.
2012-07-11 16:00:51 -0400: Disk Utility started.
2012-07-11 16:02:19 -0400: Disk Utility started.
2012-07-12 23:22:04 -0400: Disk Utility started.
2012-07-13 09:13:52 -0400: Disk Utility started.
2012-07-13 09:20:22 -0400: Disk Utility started.
2012-07-13 09:45:11 -0400: Disk Utility started.
===== Friday, July 13, 2012 9:47:15 AM Eastern Daylight Time =====

My MacBook Pro no longer "sees" my LACie external hard drive

Hello,
I need you help with this one. My MacBook Pro no longer "sees" my LACie external hard drive. In the System Profiler (under FireWire) the drive is listed as:
FireWire Bus:
Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec
Unknown Device:
Manufacturer: Unknown
Model: Unknown
Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Unknown
Can anyone help me to correct this issue? Thank you in advance for your help!!
Nat

I was finally able to resolve this issue. I went to LaCie's site and went to the support area to find troubleshooting steps for my particular drive. It turns out that the problem was corrected when I swapped the power supply cord of the "troubled" drive with another LaCie drive that I have and that seemed to resolve the problem. Thank you Tony for your help. I appreciate you guys!
Thanks,
Nat

External hard drive use with both Mac and Windows

I know that you can't use an iPod (through iTunes) with both Mac and Windows, but can you still use it as an external hard drive with both operating systems?

Yes, if the iPod is in Windows format. Mac OS X can read and write Windows formatted iPods, but Windows can't access Mac formatted disks unless special software is installed.
(9844)

I recently transferred my ITunes library to an external hard drive. I made sure to copy all the data from the saved location. After the transfer I noticed that a lot of albums are missing the first song and some recently purchased albums are missing.

I recently transferred my ITunes library to an external hard drive. I made sure to copy all the data from the saved location. After the transfer I noticed that a lot of albums are missing the first song and some recently purchased albums are missing. Is there any way to recover the data? Thanks for any help.

I may have found an answer here:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to -a-new-hard-drive
They only thing I can assume is that my external hard drive was slow to start and iTunes defaulted to its old directory (see the last paragraph at the link above). However, once my external was recognized shouldn't everything have fixed itself?
Message was edited by: williamson42
Message was edited by: williamson42

External Hard Drive and Audio Recording Application

Hi, hope everyone is doing well today. I'm new to this forum but I have been occasionally browsing it from time to time and find it very useful. So I figured I would post a couple questions that I have.
First of all I would like to tell you all excatly what I want to do with my computer. Currently I am trying to optimize my computer for the Audio Recording Application I have *Cubase SX 3* I recently just upgraded my RAM from 512 KB to 1.5 GB. My next purchased is most definitaly going to be an external hard drive, which leads me to my first question.
1. If someone could recomend me an external hard drive that is abosolutly amazing for audio recording and such around $150. I would ONLY be using the drive to save my audio files. Definitaly needs to be firewire also.
2. Next question is. I've heard of people booting from their external hard drives which has nothing but there OS and there audio recording application. That way when they boot it up they don't have processes running "Behind the scenes" and taking up some processor power. Is this true? If so, how would you going about doing this and what would I need?
3. If anybody else that is reading this is like me and does alot of audio editing on their iMac G5 computer if you could give me some tips in optimizing the performance of the computer in order to get the most out of it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks ahead of time everyone.
Bard
iMac G5 w/o iSight Mac OS X (10.4.4) 20" screen 2.0 Ghz, 1.5 RAM, 250GB Hard Drive

1. If someone could recomend me an external hard
drive that is abosolutly amazing for audio recording
and such around $150. I would ONLY be using the
drive to save my audio files. Definitaly needs to be
firewire also.
Hard drives are pretty much the same. 7200 rpm are obviously a bit faster than 5400rpm. Why Firewire? USB 2 is about the same speed as standard Firewire 400, but the drives are cheaper.
2. Next question is. I've heard of people booting
from their external hard drives which has nothing but
there OS and there audio recording application. That
way when they boot it up they don't have processes
running "Behind the scenes" and taking up some
processor power. Is this true? If so, how would you
going about doing this and what would I need?
OS processes are going to be running in the background regardless of which disk the OS is on, that's what an OS does! If you don't want more processes simply make sure you don't have any other apps open. I don't know Cubase, but a G5 will handle video editing along with background tasks no problem, and video editing generally involves far more data manipulation than just sound, even if you're doing multiple tracks.
You can easily install the OS on an external hard drive using your original system install disk. Simply connect the drive and choose that as the destination in the installer. To boot from that you would choose it in System preferences/Startup Disk. You could minimise that system by deleting other applications from that drive's Applications folder, turning off internet connections, disabling all widgets etc, but as long as you only have Cubase open it shouldn't make too much difference.
3. If anybody else that is reading this is like me
and does alot of audio editing on their iMac G5
computer if you could give me some tips in optimizing
the performance of the computer in order to get the
most out of it.
There's not really much else to optimise. Modern Macs are not like computers of old, and OS X is a very modern system, not requiring the type of disk optimisation etc that there used to be.
See: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

PC External Hard Drive is Slowing my System Down

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