Poor external Firewire Drive writing speed

[Sofad]

Hi,

i have a problem with my external hard disk. The write performance is very poor. It's an Western Digital MyBook, connected via Firewire to an G4 Yikes (PCI) 400Mhz Powermac.

Reading from that disk is fast (16 MB/sec) writing to the disk is below 1MB/sec.

I'm running Panther 10.3.9, the external drive is fresh formatted in HFS+ Journaled.

I tried 3 different firewire cables, the external hard disk is connected to the power. The speed is the same on both firewire ports of the powermac.

I disconnected all other peripherales, if i duplicate a file on the internal drive the speed is ok (i did that to check if the internal drive has problems).


see the attached benchmark for details...

ps

today i tried another 40gig external firewire harddrive, the same thing. fast read, slow write speed...


Any ideas?

Thank you...

 

[richard.mac]

how is USB? do you have a USb 2.0 external hard disk to test with? maybe your firewire port is dying? might be your WD drive too.

USB will be a little slower at it uses CPU load but firewire does not so its not an issue with the G4 chip.

 

[Sofad]

USB 1.1 only on this mac...

the wd ist new, i tried it with another harddrive, same thing...

i wonder why the reading speed is 20x faster...