External HD woes.

[snaky69]

I have a 500gb seagate drive in a usb 2.0 and firewire enclosure.

When using USB 2.0, everything works perfectly fine, the drive mounts isntantly and file transfers go at the expected speed.

When plugged in via firewire 400, everything slows to a crawl, and it is unbearable, I'm not talking a bit slow, I'm talking stupidly slow, just copying a 20mb file can take up to an hour. I'm thinking the enclosure may be at fault here, would I be wrong?

 

[iBookG4user]

Do you have another computer that you can test it on?

 

[snaky69]

Do you have another computer that you can test it on?

Well, I've used the enclosure in bootcamp with windows 7, file transfers appeared to be going normally. I ought to reboot in windows and give that a try right away.

 

[snaky69]

Well, I've used the enclosure in bootcamp with windows 7, file transfers appeared to be going normally. I ought to reboot in windows and give that a try right away.

Seems that windows cannot even see the drive even though it has a fat32 partition on it when using firewire.

It seems to work correctly with USB though.

 

[iBookG4user]

Hmm, do you have another FireWire cable that you can test it with? I'd still suggest trying it with another computer as well. Or if you have another FireWire device, does that function normally with your computer?

 

[snaky69]

Hmm, do you have another FireWire cable that you can test it with? I'd still suggest trying it with another computer as well. Or if you have another FireWire device, does that function normally with your computer?

I just tried in on a windows laptop, a toshiba tecra s10, plugged it in and it recognized the windows partition instantly... My macbook pro is 1 year out of warranty, this does not bode well...

 

[iBookG4user]

I just tried in on a windows laptop, a toshiba tecra s10, plugged it in and it recognized the windows partition instantly... My macbook pro is 1 year out of warranty, this does not bode well...

Hmm, try grabbing another cable on the off chance that it is a bad one (unlikely now, but worth a shot). But now I would try another FireWire device to see if the port is dead or not, if the second FireWire device works on the Toshiba, but not on the Mac, then it is the port at fault.

 

[snaky69]

Hmm, try grabbing another cable on the off chance that it is a bad one (unlikely now, but worth a shot). But now I would try another FireWire device to see if the port is dead or not, if the second FireWire device works on the Toshiba, but not on the Mac, then it is the port at fault.

I do not own any firewire devices apart from this enclosure so I can't test this right now.

I've tried copying a 4.5mb file, the copy started 3 minutes ago, I'm at 3.8mb, and now it just ended as I was typing this. Firewire IS usable, but it's painstakingly slow as hell.

 

[snaky69]

I just did a verify disk with disk utility on the mac partition, and everything seems back to normal. This is quite the oddball problem....


Edit: Writing to the disk is what takes forever, when I copy files to it it goes extremely slow, a 3.2mb file I'm copying right now is still "estimating time remaining" after 2 minutes.

Edit 2: These problems started when I installed snow leopard, this enclosure and drive both worked perfectly fine beforehand.