Slow External Hard Drive

[linux0987]

A few days ago, I bought a Western Digital Elements 1TB external USB hard drive.

It is meant for recorded TV, so I started to transfer the recorded TV files from my iMac over to the hard drive. Everything started well, the files were writing at about 40MB/s. But after about ten minutes, the write speed slowed to about 3MB/s. If I disconnect the Hard Drive from the iMac and plug it in again, to re-try, the write speed stays at 3MB/s. Although, on the odd occasion it will start off having a write speed of 40MB/s and slow down again.

The hard drive has one partition, formatted as HFSJ+, and has a GUID Partition Table.

 

Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

[Timdphotos]

what size are the files? if you are continuously copying large files to and from a hard drive formatted to the mac os

journaled format then you might need to defragment it, Macs are meant to be able to Defragment by themselves but

they actually only defragment after files of about 30 mb or something so then your files start to go all over different places on the hard drive and it slows down, meaning you need to defragment it. i had the same problems as i am constantly shifting my games around

[Belldandy]

i have the exact same exernal hard drive! The only problem i have with it is that when i first try to sync it to my desktop it takes a LONG time. itll take almost a minuite for it to sync. But then afterwards it is fine. As for uploading, i just uploaded a almost 300MB show and it took it 15 seconds (sorry i dont know how many MB/sec that is).

 

how long does it take yours (and what size are the files)?

 

and when its uploading do you really hear the thing (gears, whatever) grinding inside of it? thats another thing mine does that i dont like.

 

good luck!

[Oczo]

I've had bad experiences with the quality of external hard drives, no matter which manufacturer made them. Since you just bought this, you may not want to hear this, but my advice is to get a hard disk dock and buy only Caviar Blacks to use with them. Even Western Digital uses the less reliable Caviar Green in their external hard disks. One of the ways the Caviar Green saves energy is by having a lower spin speed. This means that they use can use cheaper bearing and motor parts for the hard disk.