External USB drives slow

It really does seem the last update (feb) sorted it.

Has anyone still got the issue?

I have it since the 10.5.2 update. WD Mybook drive, USB card reader, Canon 350D, all unbelievably slow on the USB port. A reboot and PRAM reset fixes it temporarily.

Great to see other people with this issue.

I am also using a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 320 GB external drive, and I am getting the slow USB problem as well.

One big note: I am not just getting slow speeds on that drive alone, but on everything USB including my iPhone.

A PRAM reset helps for a little while, and then it goes back to very slow speeds, tested using AJA KONA with speeds as low as 0.4 MB/s.

It is a pain in the neck to have to keep rebooting to have the issue fixed for just a little while, if at all.

Any help would be great! I will keep looking here and post any help I find.

From what I've heard, some external drives use some power saving mode that doesn't play nice with USB. Or rather, since the USB bus thinks it has lost the drive, it'll remount it in "slow-mode". This came up in some slashdot topic about the Seagate drives combined with Linux, but I suppose MacOS X could be prone to the same problem.

I've had a USB drive once, and that was slow as molasses, too. I prefer firewire drives for that very reason.

*Note that this pertains specifically to Seagate FreeAgent drives, but the problem may be similar on other manufacturers' drives. Check with your manufacturer to see if there is any way to disable power management or "sleep" on your external drive.

After struggling with this for quite some time on my FreeAgent 500GB USB drive, I've found that the fix for this is to set the drive's sleep timer to "never." When the drive puts itself to sleep, it consistently wakes back up attached to the Mac's low-speed USB 1.1 bus (not the high-speed 2.0 bus, where it should attach).

Unfortunately, and IMO altogether ridiculously, the Mac version of their FreeAgent Drive Manager software doesn't allow you to change that setting.

The only way to permanently fix this issue is to hook the drive up to a Windows PC (or drop into XP bootcamp, if it's installed on your Mac), download and install the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop software for XP, and use its Drive Manager utility to set the power management sleep timer to "never."

Note that the drive will be recognized in XP, but it'll come up as "UNKNOWN" if you've Mac-formatted the drive. This doesn't matter. The power management part of the utility is just changing settings for the enclosure, not for the actual drive itself.

Hope this info helps.

Hey Suhr,

Thanks a lot for this input. I will try it after my drive is finished a 24 MB Time Machine backup - which will probably be in about a half hour :/

No problem. Let me know if you have any luck.

OK, used boot camp to get the software, installed no problem, did a PRAM reset, and now things are running smoothly.

Hopefully this time it will stick!

Thanks again Suhr.

Suhr thank you for posting this, I used bootcamp to configure the drive to never sleep. It seemed to work for a very long time, however this morning when I turned on the computer I noticed that the drive had been set to use the slow USB port again... I'm not sure what could've caused this, I will look deeper into the matter and post my findings.
Is this fix still working for you?

Just ran in to this myself this weekend...yuck. No USB device worked correctly on the high speed USB bus...iPhone, printer, hard drives, video camera, NOTHING; the other USB bus ("slow" one?) worked fine. I tried a bunch of stuff, repartitioning, changing USB ports, swapping hubs, etc.; none if it worked.

What finally DID work was following the directions in this article....

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303446

basically, unplug it from power and all peripherals for about half a minute....