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hafr

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Sep 21, 2011
2,743
9
I got a last generation Airport Extreme about a week ago, and I connected a Freecom 640 GB 2,5" (w/o its own power supply) after having formatted it. It worked like a charm until yesterday when all of a sudden the transfer speed dropped and has been low ever since. The first thing I did was to disconnect the drive and try it connected to the computer - it's just as fast as ever so clearly it's not the disk that's the problem.

What happened was that I was going to move all of the music folders from the different computers into the external drive to facilitate and clear up space on some of the older ones. I started with transferring a 12 GB large music folder into the drive and started consolidating the files via iTunes, because I like its folder-arranging. Almost done, and all of a sudden some albums took longer than others to add, and the consolidation took longer and longer. I stopped it there, but today - a day later - I realized that the slower speed has persisted.

Copying a movie file takes much longer, and it lags quite a bit with VLC in the beginning, even after having taken almost 30 seconds to even start. But the funny thing is that I experience almost no difference if I access the disk via XBMC. But there is still a difference.

I've tried:

-disconnecting all users, removing the disk and re-inserting it
-rebooting the Airport with the disk connected
-rebooting the Airport without the disk connected
-used Time Machine to restore the iTunes library files
-rebooted the computer

...

Huh... I've been googling for answers for hours, trying to see if any setting would fix anything - and nothing. Now, as I was writing this, I was just going to try to transfer a video file - and it's back. How weird.

I'll leave this here anyway though, because maybe someone knows how to avoid this happening again, or if it's a common problem. And also because I could find any info about this happening to anyone else, so maybe at least the thread can serve to calm someone else down should they experience the same thing :)
 
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