Time Machine backup very slow on WD My Book For Mac external HD

Question

Time Machine backup very slow on WD My Book For Mac external HD

I have been using a Western Digital 1 TB external HD (My Book For Mac) to backup my data today for the first time, using their SmartWare software. Everything went smoothly, I backed up 91 GB of data in 2-3 hours.
At the same time, I have also Time Machine activated, which started backing up my files a while ago, but it is crawling at 8 MB per minute. A quick calculation tells me it will take 180 hours to back up 90 GB (?).

I have 2 questions:
1. Are SmartWare and TimeMachine supposed to be run exclusive of each other?
2. If I just ran TimeMachine, why is it so slow? I use a USB 2.0 connection that worked fine for the My Book's own software.

Thanks for your help!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Nov 18, 2009 12:40 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Nov 18, 2009 1:09 PM in response to Gerrit Begemann

You should first repartition and format the drive. Most likely it is setup for use on Windows. Try this:

Extended Hard Drive Preparation

1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.

5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.

6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

Do not use the WD software. If it's you wish to create a bootable backup of your drive as well as keep a TM backup, then you should create two partitions on the drive. One for your non-TM backup and one for TM. For the bootable backup use third-party software such as SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner, or SilverKeeper - Download at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.

Note that many WD drive systems cannot be used for bootable backups. You can find information related to this at the WD web site.

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Answer 2

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Nov 18, 2009 1:22 PM in response to Gerrit Begemann

Gerrit Begemann wrote:
. . .

Chiming in to agree with Kappy, but adding a couple of points:

You likely can't use a "bootable clone" on your drive. It may or may not work, but WD doesn't support it +at all:+ http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?pfaqid=1059

If your Time Machine backups are still slow after reformatting per Kappy's instructions, there are some other things that can slow them down. See #D2 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip* at the top of this forum.

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