slow firewire transfer speed in Snow Leopard

Question

slow firewire transfer speed in Snow Leopard

Hello,

Everything works fine in Snow Leopard, besides copying large files to my external Freecom firewire hard drives. Having a dual boot system with also Leopard installed, the problem only exists in Snow Leopard. NVRAM/PRAM reset doesn't help.
Does anyone have a clue ?

Thanks in advance,

Beliarus

Mac Mini early 2009, Mac OS X (10.6), 2 Ghz, 4 GB ram, 320 GB HDD

Posted on Aug 31, 2009 9:47 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Sep 3, 2009 7:39 AM in response to Mac Mini 2008

I have a FireWire 400 HD, it has a JMicron chipset (pretty generic but works great). I worked wonderfully on Leopard without a single glitch ever.

Now, after upgrading to SL, I experience the same as you and the drive is not responding well, hanging constantly and experiencing really slow transfer rates, that make it unusable (all applications that try to open something from it eventually hang). It's not a temporary glitch, even after several reboots and connecting/disconnecting the drive. The same drive under USB2 (it also has USB2 interface) works perfect (but I really want my firewire back).

I hope Apple fixes it! Definitely a bug.

Reply

Answer 2

Sep 6, 2009 8:56 PM in response to Mac Mini 2008

Experiencing slow transfer speeds to my lacie firewrie drive. 14 gigs says it'll take 2 hours!!!

Reply

Answer 3

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,239 points

Sep 6, 2009 9:00 PM in response to J Deschamps

No FW transfer issues at all from my MBP to my LaCie Quadra d2 via FW800.

Reply

Answer 4

Sep 9, 2009 5:09 AM in response to Mac Mini 2008

Same thing here with a JMicron type FW400 drive, very slow but works ok via USB.

Reply

Answer 5

Sep 11, 2009 2:14 AM in response to Shuttleworth125

Hello,

The problem is finally solved after applying the 10.6.1 update, followed by a NVRAM/PRAM reset !

Amaury

Reply

Answer 6

Sep 12, 2009 7:22 AM in response to Mac Mini 2008

How do you reset NVRAM/PRAM? What does it do?

Reply

Answer 7

Sep 13, 2009 3:01 PM in response to Mac Mini 2008

sigh... unfortunattely... updated and did a reset, but the problem still exists. My harddrive: Lacie d2 Quadra 500 gb attached with FW400 (profiler shows connection with 400 mb/s)... hope that someone has another suggestion?

Reply

Answer 8

Sep 13, 2009 10:40 PM in response to Keyoke_NL

Hello,

Strangely enough, it did work once, but after a reboot the problem seems to be there again. On the other hand, my first Time Machine backup on my third Freecom firewire drive was very slow and after formatting the drive with the Snow Leopard disk utility the problem was solved. Therefore, since reformatting my firewire data discs isn't really an option, I have rebuild their directory structure with DiskWarrior 4.2 (SL compatible) ans yes, this time, without rebooting, data transfer is really fast ! It seems that SL is quite sensitive about the quality of the HFS+ directory structures.

Amaury

Reply

Answer 9

Sep 14, 2009 12:22 AM in response to Shuttleworth125

@Shuttleworth125

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

Amaury

Reply

Answer 10

Sep 14, 2009 1:34 AM in response to Mac Mini 2008

Thank you.

Reply

Answer 11

Sep 14, 2009 2:37 AM in response to Mac Mini 2008

Hello,

Copying from external drives to my SL drive is fast, but the other way it is slow !?

Amaury

Reply

Answer 12

Sep 14, 2009 5:04 AM in response to Mac Mini 2008

I am also encountering this Firewire 400 slowdown. My transfer rates from iMac to external drive with 10.5.8 were >16 MB/s, but now under 10.6 and 10.6.1 are ~2.5 MB/s. In the other direction (from external Firewire 400 drive to iMac) are ~18 MB/s with 10.6.1, but were ~15 MB/s with 10.5.8. I have tried a low level reformat of the external drive with SN Disk Utility, but with no improvement. Flashing PRAM did not help. Any other ideas?

Reply

Answer 13

Sep 15, 2009 11:32 AM in response to Michael Brooks1

Hello,

Did someone try a SMC reset ?

Amaury

Reply

Answer 14

Sep 15, 2009 1:23 PM in response to Keyoke_NL

Mine is also no better after the update and resetting the PRAM.

Reply

Answer 15

Sep 16, 2009 4:28 PM in response to Mac Mini 2008

After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I have VERY slow file transfer speed with external eSATA drives. While trying to upgrade from a 1.5TB drive to a new 2TB drive, the copy took almost 24 hours and then failed on a large Fusion virtual OS file.

So I removed my eSATA card from my Mac Pro and connected the drives via FireWire 800. Same issue. I have the 10.6.1 update and reset the PRAM with no improvement.

Tried doing the copy with SuperDuper, and I have the same speed issue, but checking their log I see some of the files that Finder tried to copy, SuperDuper found another way to copy. Others it fails on. Here's a log of one of the files it could copy (but Finder couldn't):

| 06:19:31 PM | Info | WARNING: Caught I/O exception(12): Cannot allocate memory
| 06:19:31 PM | Info | WARNING: Source: /Volumes/DPR/Data/Private/Drive Images/Fusion/Windows Vista 64/MS Win Vista Ult 64 SP2.vmwarevm/Windows Vista x64 Edition-s002.vmdk, lstat(): 0
| 06:19:31 PM | Info | WARNING: Target: /Volumes/DPR2/Data/Private/Drive Images/Fusion/Windows Vista 64/MS Win Vista Ult 64 SP2.vmwarevm/Windows Vista x64 Edition-s002.vmdk, lstat(): 0
| 06:19:31 PM | Info | Attempting to copy file using copyfile().
| 06:21:42 PM | Info | Successfully copied file.

Reply