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I'm trying to back up some data on an external hard drive and am finding the transfer rate to be unbearably slow.

My environment is as follows:

  • Macbook Pro Unibody (late 2008)
  • Windows 7 RC, 64-bit
  • Lacie, rugged 500GB portable hard drive

I have tried using a number of methods including simple copying in Explorer, Teracopy, Crashplan, and Windows backup. I am averaging around 1MB/s which seems terribly slow.

How do I identify what is the cause of this slow file transfer, and then how do I go about addressing the issue.

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

1MB/sec is crazily slow - there's definitely a problem.

The cause, or causes, could be :

  1. Are you copying many small files?
  2. Are there any background processes running?
  3. Is the driver correct?
  4. Something wrong with the Lacie drive?

Speaking about driver... I found an interesting quote here vis-a-vis slow Firewire (1394) transfers too.

Just go to Device Manager and do Update Driver on 13494 OHCI, then from the list of available drivers choose the following one 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy) .

You might want to give it a shot.

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1. Its a mix of large and small files 2. Nothing in the background 3. Will just try your driver advice and get back to you 4. The Lacie is fine because I tried USB right after posting the question here and I was getting rates between 4-18 Mbps and averaging around 7Mbps. So its definitely the Firewire – dtmunir Sep 5 '09 at 4:29
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