External Blu-Ray Riplock Oddity

[martinm0]

Is Riplock something that is initiated by the operating system? I connected my external Blu-Ray drive (Samsung SH-B123L) to the iMac and began backing up Iron Man 2 with Pavtube's Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac. I noticed it was taking a while, so I checked Activity Monitor and noticed the drive was peaking at ~6mb/s. I cancelled the backup, and connected the drive back to my Hackintosh and ran the same process with same programs and movie and this time activity monitor showed a peak of ~12mb/s (twice as fast as on the iMac). I also noticed slow backup speeds when I tried this on my 2011 i7 MBP, but didn't give it much thought at the time.

I would think if this was Riplock it would be uniform on all machines (expecially OSX machines), but this seems to indicate that maybe Riplock is something built into OSX?

Anyone have any ideas or noticed the same?

 

[tsugaru]

Is Riplock something that is initiated by the operating system? I connected my external Blu-Ray drive (Samsung SH-B123L) to the iMac and began backing up Iron Man 2 with Pavtube's Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac. I noticed it was taking a while, so I checked Activity Monitor and noticed the drive was peaking at ~6mb/s. I cancelled the backup, and connected the drive back to my Hackintosh and ran the same process with same programs and movie and this time activity monitor showed a peak of ~12mb/s (twice as fast as on the iMac). I also noticed slow backup speeds when I tried this on my 2011 i7 MBP, but didn't give it much thought at the time.

I would think if this was Riplock it would be uniform on all machines (expecially OSX machines), but this seems to indicate that maybe Riplock is something built into OSX?

Anyone have any ideas or noticed the same?

Ruh roh. Let's hope not.
Let's do some rudimentary processes of elimination first though.

1 - what enclosure are you using? USB 2? Firewire 800/400?
2 - when you say you connected it to your Hackintosh, was it connected directly via the SATA connections on the motherboard, or the same external interface on your iMac?
3 - what firmware version is on the drive? Have you updated the firmware from Samsung on the drive?

 

[martinm0]

Thanks for the reply tsugaru. Regarding your questions:

1.) Enclosure is a Vantec USB 2.0/eSata
2.) Connected via USB 2.0 to both machines
3.) I have not updated firmware yet (and think its running SB02, which I know is behind current).

What is really driving me nuts is that the hackintosh is running SL 10.6.6, so its either something with the 10.6.7, or the kexts on the hackintosh are helping bypass this slow down (again, even running old firmware its able to achieve full speed under the Hackintosh...)

Are there any codecs or anything that might speed this up that I may not have loaded on my new iMac yet that might be on my other machine? I know, seems unlikely/silly, but there has to be something different...

 

[martinm0]

I've gone back and done more testing and have confirmed that the drive does indeed run slower on the new iMac than the Hackintosh.

On the 2011 i7 iMac, the drive runs at ~4MB/s for both direct blu ray rip and file copy through Finder. On the Hackintosh, it runs at 8-12MB/s for both direct rip and file copy.

Anyone have any ideas??

 

[tsugaru]

Update the firmware and check again.

At most, it's a USB chip issue. I know on my 2008 MacBook Pro (nVidia nForce based chipset) compared to either of the newer iMacs I own, USB 2.0 speeds are about 8-10% faster on the nVidia chipset, even if the processor is a lot slower. 36MB/s vs 31MB/s. Same USB drives.

Hope it's just the firmware.

Maybe try booting into Windows on that iMac and seeing if the drive is still slow under that.

 

[martinm0]

I updated the firmware and that doesn't appear to have made any difference in speeds. I'll try installing Windows on the iMac later today and see how it responds.

 

[OptyCT]

I have that same blu-ray drive, and I've been using it with MakeMKV. Typically, it takes about a half-hour to backup and convert the main movie title to .mkv. I'm using a late-2009 2.53 GHz C2D MBP. I'll try backing up a blu-ray tonight and check the Activity Monitor for speeds.

As a side question, how do you update the firmware of this drive? I've only seen firmware updates for this drive via Windows and nothing for Mac.

 

[martinm0]

I updated the firmware through Windows, which I think is the only way to do it. I was running the SB02 firmware without any real issues, so not sure if you're missing out on anything.

I will have to test out MakeMKV tonight, though I anticipate it will be much of the same. Will have to try copying non-video files from the drive through Finder and see if the files themselves impact the transfers speeds as well.

 

[martinm0]

I tested out the Blu-ray drive on a 2.0Ghz Mac Mini from a few years ago and got the same transfer speed of ~4MB/s. Grrrrrrrrr.

Running all the updates now on Windows 7 and will test the drive on the iMac once that's installed.

Stay tuned...

 

[OptyCT]

I just ran a test and was getting data read speeds of between 20 and 24 MB/s. I ripped a 2 hour blu-ray to .mkv using MakeMKV in 30 minutes. I'm using a Samsung SH-B123L blu-ray drive connected via USB 2.0 to my '09 MBP. I picked up the drive last week and have not updated the firmware.

When I first ran MakeMKV, it installed DASPI v. 1.2. I don't know what it does, but the program said it would improve data speed performance of the drive.

 

[martinm0]

I set up Windows 7 on the 2011 iMac and did some more testing. And here's the odd part -- speeds were all over the place. Typically faster than 4MB/s, but it would vary widely with each test. Copying the entire BDMV folder from the disc at one point stated 3hrs, then on another test it stated an hour.

I then decided to try different media, wondering if the file type was part of the issue. I took the Win7 install disc and copied all the files directly from the disc to a folder in Explorer, and again, the speeds were all over the place. Definitely faster than the blu-ray files, but still was not consistent where in some cases it copied the 3GB of files in under a minute, and in other times it would take ~6 minutes (no other programs were running under Win7 at that time either). I then tested out a DVD movie and a CD of MP3's. The DVD Video TS folder copied at the ~4MB/s speeds, while copying the MP3's from the CD varied widely with speeds well into 20-30MB/s (CD had about 600MB on it). Seems like the file type (i.e. video files) are prevented from transferring at full speed.

At this point, I don't know what to think. I never had any real consistency issues under the Hackintosh with this drive setup externally, but now I'm starting to wonder if the drive is bad, if its the external case, or something to do with the USB controllers Apple is using.

OptyCT - could you test an mm2ts file from a Blu-ray through finder a few times and let me know what kind of speeds you're getting? Would you also test out different file types and see if video files transfer much slower than non-video files? Much appreciated if you could. Thanks!

 

[martinm0]

Ho. Lee. Crap. It turns out it is 10.6.7 that is making the transfer slow! I updated the Hackintosh from 10.6.6 to 10.6.7 to wrap up all the loose ends and speeds went from 20-30MB/s avg to 4MB/s. I'm stunned (and a bit confused) at this point.

Can anyone else confirm if they get reduced transfer speeds from blu-rays on 10.6.7? And if this is really true, would this be a deliberate move on Apple's part or just a bug?

 

[martinm0]

Alright, final update to this whole debacle. I tested out the external BD drive on my 2011 MBP running 10.6.7 and found the speeds stuck at 4MB/s. The iMac comes pre-loaded with 10.6.7 with no way to test 10.6.6, so I did a fresh install on the MBP to 10.6.6 and without running any updates I tested the speeds and found them to be up in the 20MB/s. So, there you have it.

I'm curious now to see if its just this BD drive, or if its all drives ripping video content...

 

[tsugaru]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Time to hit up Apple's bug reporter.

Must be a USB kext issue.