USB Disk access "Extremely" Slow

I have the same problem, its unbearably slow with either LAN or WLAN

In 5GHz mode I get 5 Megabytes per second - sustained read speed.

I'd suggest making sure your Airport is not suffering from interference.
Use iStumbler to do this.

Also I'd recommend fully re-formatting the USB drive as HFS.

I am running it from a LAN connection, and my drives are formatted at HFS+

When on wireless i am also in the 5ghz only mode

I got my AE and Seagate FreeAgent Pro hard drive yesturday and I have the exact same problem.

If I hook up the drive to the computer directly it is very very fast.

If I hook it up to the AE it takes about 2 hours to move a couple fils totaling 2 gigs over ETHERNET!

If I transfer the same files over the same network between 2 computers the speed is much much faster.

Is this normal or some nasty firmware bug. It almost feels like the AE is using USB 1.0 for some reason.

I got my AE and Seagate FreeAgent Pro hard drive
yesturday and I have the exact same problem.

If I hook up the drive to the computer directly it is
very very fast.

If I hook it up to the AE it takes about 2 hours to
move a couple fils totaling 2 gigs over ETHERNET!

If I transfer the same files over the same network
between 2 computers the speed is much much faster.

Is this normal or some nasty firmware bug. It almost
feels like the AE is using USB 1.0 for some reason.

You guys are funny. How about checking out the specs of USB 2.0 and 802.11g/n?

Go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11g#802.11g

and here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_2.0

Firewire vs. USB tests are here:
http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/39129/USB20_Versus_FireWirepg3.html


802.11g:
Release Date Op. Frequency Data Rate (Typ) Data Rate (Max) Range (Indoor)
June 2003 2.4 GHz 19 Mbit/s 54 Mbit/s ~35 meters

802.11n:
Release Date Op. Frequency Data Rate (Typ) Data Rate (Max) Range (Indoor)
Mid 2008 5 GHz and/or 2.4 GHz 74 Mbit/s 248 Mbit/s (2 stream) ~70 meters


Bottom line: 802.11n typical is 74Mbps, 802.11g typical is 19Mbps. USB 2.0 typical is 50Mbps.

On the average, you should expect your speed to drop by over 50% when connecting the USB drive to AESB using an 802.11g device. If your device is 802.11n, then you should have pretty much similar performance.

Now, if you increase the distance from your base station, or you put walls in between, the performance of 802.11g will go down "dramatically", all the way to 2-3Mbps, easy. Not so for 802.11n, which behaves much better at longer distances.

i would accept that... except HOW DOES THAT EXPLAIN A RATE OF 0.1mbps THATS WHAT IM GETTING

Im sick of hearing how usb is slow or wireless is slow, i bloody know that, but this is neither its like its doing jack **** at all, a 2mb file refuses to be sent through the airdisk and if it starts to work finder freezes up... someone explain to me how that comes down to USB being restricted to 400mbps and wireless on 108 and lan on 100, that maths a dont make sense

Im not even talking wireless. I am only using it over ethernet.

And as I said the drive connected directly through USB to a computer it is fast. USB isn't the bottleneck.

Ethernet transfers between computers on the same network is fast.
Ethernet isn't the bottleneck.

Only when the drive plugs into the AE things slow to crawl. It took 8 hours to transfer 8 gigs.

atleast your even able to transfer anything, my transfers are so slow the systems freeze up

I don't understand how this issue can still be here 6 months after the fact.

i would accept that... except HOW DOES THAT EXPLAIN A
RATE OF 0.1mbps THATS WHAT IM GETTING

Im sick of hearing how usb is slow or wireless is
slow, i bloody know that, but this is neither its
like its doing jack **** at all, a 2mb file refuses
to be sent through the airdisk and if it starts to
work finder freezes up... someone explain to me how
that comes down to USB being restricted to 400mbps
and wireless on 108 and lan on 100, that maths a dont
make sense

Clearly there is something wrong with your setup or you are having interference issues. As several other have commented on other threds, one should expect a 50-70% reduced performance when using a USB disk over wireless. If you got anything worse than that, when the router is not moving any other data, then I would look at the amount of interference/noise/thick walls that you may have in your specific situation.

Data flows perfectly fine over the network from mac to mac and mac to internet, both over wireless and wired.

This is CLEARLY a problem with the base station, nothing should cause such a slow down as i have used my imac in the same setup and with blazing fast speeds.

semaja,

Like I said. I get a sustained 5MegaBYTES per second from my Airdisk setup.
That's fast enough to move 2Gigs in about 4-5 minutes.

It's not Raid Array speeds - but it is plenty fast enough for media streaming etc.

You are seeing speeds much slower than this even over ethernet?
The ONLY possible cause I can see is if the drive is constantly giving errors.
I recommend doing a slow reformat of the drive.

First off sorry if im coming off angry, but i just got sick of responses making me look like a idiot.

As for the errors, i can hook the drives up directly to my Mac and they work perfect and pass all the checks, they have also been recently formated so they should be safe.

I really would like a simple fix for this as driving into the city for a replacement will be a pain and inconveniences for the traffic and the loss of the network for a while

semaja,

If we have ruled out....
Wireless interference (because we are not using wireless)
Disk errors (because you are confident that the drive has no errors)

I am down to ... er.... IP address clash?
Are all clients on the network being assigned an IP address by DHCP?

Everybody running firmware 7.1.1? That increased my AirDisk speeds enormously.