Western Digital Elements 2TB Slow transfer?

Johnny|lucidcomposure · 9 Jan 2011 at 02:48

Okay so I have asked my mac to send 500gig of photos to the usb 2TB Elements back up device and the speed is about 1mb every couple of seconds.

Whats the deal here?

Transfers from Internal drives are 20/40mbs

Is this because its thousands of individual files. Each file will be between 4mb/15mbish

Aleksandrs · 9 Jan 2011 at 03:56

My LaCie Quadra D2 is starting to do this now too. It actually eventually stops after a point for me, not sure if it would for you.

No idea what it is, but I'd like to know also.

Johnny|lucidcomposure · 9 Jan 2011 at 11:12

I just transfered 250Gig to it in around 1+ hour which I think its more than acceptable!
This is a lot of episodes like family guy and other series plus all my camera videos. Also about 100gig of audio files mp3s so thats great.

However sending the contents from the photography 500gig drive (a lot of raw files and jpegs)

I have like an hour counter of around several thousand hours?

FreeStream · 9 Jan 2011 at 11:51

Turn spotlight off for the external drive?

Otherwise not a clue, something suggests that one of the drives isn't healthy, as I get:

>100MB/Sec internal transfers (WD Black 1TB)
>75MB/Sec to a 2Tb WD Green via FW800.
>25MB/sec to a USB 2Tb WD Green.

That's transferring MP3s, Video files or files from my 40D/7D.

Johnny|lucidcomposure · 9 Jan 2011 at 11:56

Concorde Rules said:
Turn spotlight off for the external drive?

Otherwise not a clue, something suggests that one of the drives isn't healthy, as I get:

>100MB/Sec internal transfers (WD Black 1TB)
>75MB/Sec to a 2Tb WD Green via FW800.
>25MB/sec to a USB 2Tb WD Green.

That's transferring MP3s, Video files or files from my 40D/7D.

oh god don't say that. Thats the only drive I care about been healthy! lol

FreeStream · 9 Jan 2011 at 12:02

Johnny|lucidcomposure said:
oh god don't say that. Thats the only drive I care about been healthy! lol

Is this your only backup drive?

Should have more than one method of backing up!

I have:

2Tb Green via Time Machine
2TB Green via Synk Pro every week - disk is stored at a mates house.

knowledge123 · 9 Jan 2011 at 16:51

What is the drive formatted as ? NTFS or HFS?

Johnny|lucidcomposure · 9 Jan 2011 at 17:37

Concorde Rules said:
Is this your only backup drive?

Should have more than one method of backing up!

I have:

2Tb Green via Time Machine
2TB Green via Synk Pro every week - disk is stored at a mates house.

I have a hdd for photos, hdd for audio and video, hdd for general bits n bobs. Now got a 2tb usb drive that TimeMachine is gonna back everything upto included the other hdd which is my boot drive.

Also going to save up for a 4 drive bay QNAP NAS

Johnny|lucidcomposure · 9 Jan 2011 at 17:38

knowledge123 said:
What is the drive formatted as ? NTFS or HFS?

the mac drive is MAC Journeled I presume and so is the 2TB back up.

knowledge123 · 9 Jan 2011 at 17:58

Johnny|lucidcomposure said:
the mac drive is MAC Journeled I presume and so is the 2TB back up.

Ah, ok.

External drives (if they arrive pre-formatted) are usually NTFS, if this is the case then Tuxera is the best solution for reading and writing to it, or failing that, NTFS 3G.

Semple · 9 Jan 2011 at 18:03

I presume it's to do with the thousands of photographs being transferred. I think it's easier for the computer and drive if there's only one large file to send rather than several thousand small files.

Johnny|lucidcomposure · 9 Jan 2011 at 18:16

Semple said:
I presume it's to do with the thousands of photographs being transferred. I think it's easier for the computer and drive if there's only one large file to send rather than several thousand small files.

I believe it is this also. But there was more audio files than there are photos. Just the size of the photos are greater.

Yeah mate as soon as I got the drive I formatted it for MAC. It did come NTFS.

UKTopGun · 9 Jan 2011 at 18:55

Mine's been slow recently too... not sure if it's because its NTFS but I hadn't used the drive for about a month and I'm sure it was fine before!

Rameses · 9 Jan 2011 at 23:38

Is it not because the transfer over USB is borked by the slow write speed of most 5400rpm drives which then gives off weird time remaining? (like data is backing up?

)

Also if its writing multiple small files then the HDDs header is probably flapping around like a humming bird.

FreeStream · 9 Jan 2011 at 23:45

Semple said:
I presume it's to do with the thousands of photographs being transferred. I think it's easier for the computer and drive if there's only one large file to send rather than several thousand small files.

Up to a point, but for a test my iTunes library went over internally to another disk at a *minimum* of 40MB/Sec.

7200 to 7200 however, so in theory that's the transfer rate you should achieve, well over what a USB connection can deal with and thus no bottleneck from the disk IO point of view.

Writing speed shouldn't be the issue as it's just recording perpendicularly, unless the disk is heavily fragmented...

Either way I don't think it's down to OS X, just down to hardware being funny somewhere.