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Zillion

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 2, 2008
118
126
The Netherlands
It seems my MBpro doesnt run on USB2 speed while copying from an external hdd with NTFS. It takes like 14 minutes to copy 4GB, while this should be a couple of minutes. Any suggestions?
 
First, what drive? What enclosure? Perhaps the problem is enclosure, rather than MBP.
Second, you mentioned 4GB of data, was this a small number of big files, or rather several thousand small files?
 
USB transfers should be about 10-30MB/s, more on the lower end of that.

I have a hitachi external that does about 10/second. Not great, but decently faster than thumb drives I have.

I just got a fw800 enclosure, 50/sec! thats 3GB/min :)

if its a lot of small files, it will go slower too, opposed to one large one.
 
First, what drive? What enclosure? Perhaps the problem is enclosure, rather than MBP.
Second, you mentioned 4GB of data, was this a small number of big files, or rather several thousand small files?

Hi :)

Its a LaCie Hard Drive 320 GB USB

It concerns a DVD image with a small number of big files.

If I copy the files from a PC to the Hard Disk it takes a couple of minutes. When copying to the Macbook Pro it takes 14 minutes.
 
Hmm, dunno - maybe it's an issue with reading the NTFS format. I know Macs CAN read it but whether or not they're any good at it is another story.

Also, USB 2.0 is going to be inherently slow anyway, Firewire 400 and especially 800 are much faster than USB 2.0.

Were you doing anything else at the time on the MacBook Pro? USB 2.0 speed is often dependent on the processor as, unlike Firewire, it doesn't have it's own controller. If you were doing a bunch of stuff on the MBP it would have slowed transfer speeds down considerably.
 
Reinstalling Macfuse and latest NTFS-3G has solved this problem. Now copying is blazing fast again... 4.32 GB from external hdd to MacbookPro in less than 4 minutes :D
 
Reinstalling Macfuse and latest NTFS-3G has solved this problem. Now copying is blazing fast again... 4.32 GB from external hdd to MacbookPro in less than 4 minutes :D

Why are you using Macfuse AND NTFS-3G---use one or the other, not both.
 
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