Today I was transfering and accessing HD encoded files from my many firewire drives and then started using my USB drives and noticed a HUGE difference in speed. The USB Hard drives were brand new, and yet my old Ata 100 drives in Firewire USB cases, was MUCH MUCH faster in terms of data transfer.

So what is the problem?
USB sucks... found that out... I knew firewire was better, but I didn't know it was THAT much better. Grrr...
Well anyway I was thinking about how much faster the transfer of these files seemed in windows. I have a fat32 drive and I decided to take it to the test drive and see what I could do.

File Size:
285.1 MB
(Not too small and not too big, pretty much standard size now a days)

Conditions:
Transfer from 500 GB WD USB HD (One of those mybook series) to
1 TB GB WD USB HD ( One of the new Mybook series)

Time to Transfer (AS timed from release of click with external stopwatch)
Windows XP SP 2
Usb Drive to USb Drive: 38.77 Seconds

OSx Leopard 10.5.2 Mac Pro 8 Core
USB to USB 1:04:26 Seconds


SAY IT AIN"T SO!!!!


Next test:
Windows:
Usb Drive to Internal Sata 13:62
OSX
USB drive to internal Sata 31:29


(These internal SATA drives are the same make and model and were bought at the same time. However one is HFS, the other is NTFS...., does that effect it approx 60%, I dunno)


These were the results I received. I am a big mac guy now, but I was a little disheartened by this.
At first I thought it was that I may have a bad drive or something since I did toy with NTFS 3-g. MAYBE this is the reason... but does anyone else have the same results? Let me know

I've noticed it too. I think the mac USB- drivers are slower.

Did you use Mac (HFS) format on the USB disks? remember that FAT32 or NTFS are foreing formats on Mac OS.

Its NTFS-3g.

NTFS format has a special cache, whereas HFS does not, and Mac OS does not support the NTFS cache.

Format the USB stick to be HFS and you will get better results.

NTFS-3g performance is awful, better use Paragon NTFS, faster and safer, you can even write in compressed files.

Paragon is faster than stable NTFS-3G builds (not sure about ublio builds, they are supposed to be faster than stable) but it is not safer, I had a lot of files corrupted by Paragon, went back to NTFS-3G.

On the other side of this, MacDrive is great. It's great to plug in my time machine drive to the PC and have everything recognized ;D HFS+ just seems faster to me.

K First of all Macs are usually PROs when it comes on running HFS(journaled)
NTFS and FAT32 is out of the Macs knowledge... they're too crappy and windowish... i mean now a days no body friggin use Fat 32 on a 3gb hard disk otherwise there'll be 100 partitions... and NTFS just flaw-full..... Most of the Windows Blue screen appear on a NTFS Drive than a FAT 32 Drive.

Apple clever to drop the idea of using NTFS and FAT 32

Wait.... thats not over.... what Apple?? OMG the FIREWIRE!....

If ur talking about USB drives, Apple says fine, since even they cant control the market that USBs are more popular, but wait Apple computers run Way better on their on Homemade Firewire drivers...

So next time if you're looking for a Hard Disk to use.... Think carefully....

Portable Drives
USB - Better on Windows
FW4 - Designed by Apple and runs better on Macs
FW8 - Designed and optimized by Apple to Run FASTER than USB and Best on Macs.
NTFS - only runs on windows and lots of flaws.
FAT32 - Runs both on windows and mac... but partitioning is the problem.
HFS - Runs Perfect on Macs

So from that list. what i did was....
I got myself an External Drive with 2TB in it, thats backs up stuff.... 1TB belongs to HFS and 1TB for FAT32... cuz i do bootcamp...
My Portable Drive, i bought myself a WD 320GB my Passport, Reformatted to FAT32 using Mac's Disk Util(removes the Partitioning problems)
that way i can play world of warcraft on any cyber cafes.... and world of warcraft on my mac....

Ah, Cyber cafes... I wish we had those here in America.

NTFS-3g givers an I/O performance hit when reading or writing to NTFS formatted drives.

Use the native NTFS driver for OS X to copy from NTFS and you will probably see a big gain in speed.

When I play videos from NTFS dives with NTFS-3g in VLC, I get periodic audio jumps. (This doesn't happen in QuickTime, though, because each app handles video processing differently, one scans and plays, and the other loads and plays). If I disable NTFS-3g, VLC no longer skips audio when playing from the drive.

Macgirl is also right, NTFS and FAT32 are foreign FileSystems to Mac OS X.

It's not really fair/correct to say that FAT and NTFS support isn't native. The ability to read FAT drives has been in the Mac OS, NextStep/OpenStep, and for that matter BSD and implementations of Mach since before OS X was even thought of. Really HFS is the foreign FS since NextStep/OpenStep used UFS (which is also available in OS X). FAT and NTFS are handled just like any other filesystem "native" to OS X. It would be nice if Apple had a little cleaner implementation of NTFS support but MS not releasing technical data on it is the biggest reason why it has its limitations.

While FAT has performance issues all its own, so does HFS. HFS performance tanks when lots of nested folders are used for example.

NTFS-3G is a userspace implementation of a file system which means it's performance is always going to be sub-par when compared to the native FS choices (found in /System/Library/Filesystems/) which run in kernel space and at a lower CPU process rung.

You may want to try using ext2 for your drives as drivers exist for OS X & Windows for that FS and don't require MacFUSE's userland driver implementation to run on the Mac.

Using an internal ntfs 500gb Seagate 7200.11 drive, I can tell a big difference between the speed Leopard reads/writes to it, and windows. I think I figured out that leopard will write to it at about 3mb/s, while windows will do around 25.

I wish it was faster, since I need that drive to be readable by both windows and leopard.

Its been a few months, but I'm pretty sure I formatted the drive with Leopard as NTFS 3G. Would formating it using windows be any better?