File copying speed is SO SLOW! WHY?

[langster019]

I just recently got my MBP, and I downloaded a movie and went to copy it to my 8gb SDHC. I realize that being a big file (4.7 gb) it will take time, but on my PC laptop before this it would not take more than a half hour like it is on my MBP is now. Any reason why? is it the card? is it just the way things are on mac? what?

Help. Thanks.

 

[MacDawg]

How is the card formatted?
If it is FAT32, it won't take files over 4 GB I don't think

 

[spinnerlys]

Most probably it is the SDHC card. There are different classes of them and you might have one of the lower ones, which don't have excellent write speeds, yours has 2.5MB/s write speed as it seems.

Get a Class 6 card and the write speed will move up to 15-20MB/s.


And as MacDawg already said, FAT32 formatted flash cards will not take files over 4GB.

 

[langster019]

is there any way to get around that 4GB garbage? NTFS? will that work for files bigger than 4 GB?

 

[MacDawg]

is there any way to get around that 4GB garbage? NTFS? will that work for files bigger than 4 GB?

Yes, NTFS will work on bigger files, but your Mac will not natively write NTFS
It will only read NTFS
You would need 3rd party software like NTFS-3G to be able to write

Check out the various file systems here: MR Guide: File Systems

 

[AppleMayhem]

is there any way to get around that 4GB garbage? NTFS? will that work for files bigger than 4 GB?

OSX can read/write Fat32, but only read NTFS. No write/modify.

 

[Comma]

is there any way to get around that 4GB garbage? NTFS? will that work for files bigger than 4 GB?

You need a program to write to NTFS. But that or HSF+ will work. But then the card might not work with your other devices...

 

[MacDawg]

Typically flash drives and cards are formatted FAT32 so they can be used by both Macs and PCs or other devices

Changing the formatting might allow you to work with one device, but it might make it useless in another now

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Apple's implementation of read/write for Fat32 is atrociously slow.

 

[MacDawg]

Apple's implementation of read/write for Fat32 is atrociously slow.

And yet, not quite as slow as their native read/write for NTFS in Snow Leopard which is disabled

 

[langster019]

you say that it can only read NTFS, if i format it to NTFS, can I copy movies and stuff to it bigger than 4GB and will the file work if on PC?

 

[MacDawg]

you say that it can only read NTFS, if i format it to NTFS, can I copy movies and stuff to it bigger than 4GB and will the file work if on PC?

If you are moving files from your Mac to a PC and they are larger than 4 GB...
You will need to format the card as NTFS
AND you will need to install something like NTFS-3G in order to write the files from the Mac to the card
If you are going to format the card from the Mac, you will need to install NTFS-3G first for that as well

The PC will read and write NTFS with no problem

 

[JacaByte]

...or you can ditch the SDHC card altogether and figure out how to network the PC and the Macbook together. That way there'll be a lot less brain damage.

The computing world desperately needs a filesystem that 1) is portable enough to run on thumbdrives (FAT32, NTFS, HFS) 2) is compatible with Windows, OS X and Linux and is not proprietary at the same time (This would be FAT32 if it weren't designed by IBM and Microsoft trying to support disks bigger than 8.7 GB) and 3) supports files stored more than 8 directories deep (unlike UDF) files larger than 4 GB (unlike FAT32) and doesn't have a limit on the total number of files that can be stored using the file system. (FAT32 has a limit and I don't know what it is)