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usb thumb drive now slow in Leopard?

M

mopppish

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Hello.
I have a Sandisk 2.0GB USB thumb drive that I've been using for quite some time now. It's one of those ones that came with that stupid U3 software (though I got that off).
Anyway, since doing a clean install of Leopard, this drive's been giving me some problems. Data transfer to and from the drive seems to be much slower than it was under Tiger, and ejecting it is always a pain. It was instantaneous before, but now I need to wait for a minute after the last action before I can eject it. Otherwise it will say it's in use. The last time it wouldn't eject at all (kept saying an app was accessing it, even though it wasn't) and I just pulled it eventually.
I just reformatted it (FAT32 so I can use the school's Windows machines to print from), but it still seems to be an issue. Anyone else have similar problems? Do you think it's an issue with the drive or with my USB performance under Leopard? I haven't tried it with another USB drive yet, but my USB printer has been working good as always.
Thanks.

P.S. It's a Micro Cruzer.
I just got a big file off of it (1.29GB), and the transfer rate was very erratic.
 
Since the 10.5.2 update, it's even slower. It's telling me 5 hours to transfer 374MB. And it's literally crawling along at a snail's pace. Anyone else having this problem?
 
I haven't noticed any decrease is "speed" (I use speed as sarcasm here). I have a Sandisk Cruzer 1 gb thumb drive formatted in FAT32. It takes about 5 minutes to transfer 306 mb of data using Leopard 10.5.2. It starts by saying "30 minutes remaining," but it quickly declines and takes about 5-10 minutes in the end.

I'm not sure why you have problems. I hope you can figure them out. Do you have any virus checkers enabled? By chance, are you running it from a USB 1.1 port? I can't think of anything else that would slow it down. Finder is multi-threaded in Leopard so other delays should not slow down the current operation.
 
I had it plugged into the back of my iMac. I went into disk utility and erased formated it to Mac OS Extended [Journaled] and it seemed to solve the problem. The transfer went through as you'd expect. It had been formated DOS Fat 32.
 
Same problem here. Brand new 4GB thumb drive (made by Freecom) and it's taken 45 minutes to copy 200MB. I bought this one because I thought my old Kingston one was broken.

Would it help to format it exclusively for mac? (although I'd rather not)
 
If it's not important for you to search the thumb drive via Spotlight then try excluding it. I did this and I've noticed faster transfer speeds & quicker unmount times.
 
Since the 10.5.2 update, I've noticed that the USB drive feels "slower", whatever that means.. It's almost like it's going at USB 1.1 speed.

Could be spotlight, but it's definitely a new bug.😡

EDIT: I'm glad I'm not the only one with this problem!
 
I don't use my thumbdrive very often, but after I saw this post I thought I would give it a whirl. Transfered a 340MB file in about 8 minutes. File system is FAT16.
 
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