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external hd mounting

F

Freyqq

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 13, 2004
4,038
181
EVery time I try to mount my external USB 2.0 hd, it takes about 5 minutes to detect and mount it. Also, every time I try to eject it, it says its busy. Is this suppose to happen?
 
No.

I'm not sure what is wrong, but it shouldn't take anywhere near that long to mount/unmount. Just out of curiosity, you're not connecting accidentally via a USB 1.1 port, are you (like one on the keyboard or the back of a monitor)?
 
do you have anyway you could backup the data on that, and then reformat it? as that may help
 
definitely 2.0..but its nice to know that this isn't a common problem

its in Fat32..could that be it?
 
bmcgrath said:
Is it a Iomega drive by any chance? I was using one of them. Took ages to mount it, but I wasn't having the same issues you are having when ejecting it.
Click to expand...

its an acomdata enclosure with a western digital 160 gig hd in fat 32 I believe
 
Hmm strange one. It could just be the drive, I doubht it's because it is in fat 32. I'v used a external drive in fat32 and it mounted almost straight away. I dunno any other reasons thats causing it :(
 
i'll just format it when i get time and try that

1 more question..the enclosure can do USB 2.0 and Firewire 400. Is it just me or does Firewire have much faster transfer speeds? You'd think they would be about the same..but firewire is at least 3x faster.
 
I had a similar mounting problem with two drives I had taken from other machines, turned out that their jumpers were still set to slave, not master or cable select. I don't think that caused any problems ejecting though. If it's a drive and enclosure you put together yourself, it's worth checking the jumper settings.

From what I understand, FireWire is better at sustained transfers of large audio and video files, not much difference if you're just doing smaller stuff like Office documents or MP3 files.

cpjakes
 
USB 2.0 is theoretically faster (480MB/S as opposed to 400MB/S)

However, I think you're right. Realistically firewire is faster, not sure I'd say 3 times as fast though.
 
Theory aside, my FW400 drives always seem to beat the pants off my USB 2.0 ones - where the internal HDs are the same make and model. I've yet to see see USB 2.0 ever even get close, so I'm curious as to which file transfers would maximize that speed.
 
idk its weird. In windows firewire and usb seem to be about even. In osx, usb is really slow compared to windows but firewire is about the same as windows..hence faster.
 
aaronw1986 said:
USB 2.0 is theoretically faster (480MB/S as opposed to 400MB/S)

However, I think you're right. Realistically firewire is faster, not sure I'd say 3 times as fast though.
Click to expand...

Theoretically, I could become the leader of the free world, too.

In real world file transfer, Firewire 400 is almost exactly twice as fast as USB 2.0 (I benchmarked it on a 1.3 Gb file transfer, same hard drive, same machine)
 
CanadaRAM said:
Theoretically, I could become the leader of the free world, too.

In real world file transfer, Firewire 400 is almost exactly twice as fast as USB 2.0 (I benchmarked it on a 1.3 Gb file transfer, same hard drive, same machine)
Click to expand...

this is true. I have an enclosure and i switched from USB to Firewire (same enclosure) and it flies. 700mb transfer in under a minute. blew me away.
 
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