Terrible FW400 speeds in Snow Leopard

[Luke Redpath]

I was wondering if anybody else here has had any issues with external hard drives running over FW400 in Snow Leopard. Google doesn't turn up much although there does seem to be some discussion going on on the Apple support forums.

I have two Freecom hard drives - a 1TB FW400 drive and a 500GB USB drive. Both running on an Intel Mac Mini, neither had problems in Leopard.

I've recently upgraded my Mac Mini (clean install) and now the FW400 write speeds are terrible. Read speeds seem unaffected. I took some benchmarks using XBench; you can see just how bad this is:

FW400, 1TB drive:



USB, 500GB drive:



I had a quick search on here but couldn't find any reports of other users having this issue. I've fired off a support email to Freecom but I suspect the issue lies with Snow Leopard and FW rather than the drives. Hopefully Freecom are aware of the issue (I've heard of reported problems with other drives too, perhaps its a chipset issue?). Any idea on how to contact Apple about this?

It makes the Firewire drive practically unusable. I keep all of my movies on it and I use it to run weekly system backups. Copying over even a 500MB movie file takes about 25 minutes!