Slow copy speeds to USB in Lion

I only have this problem if I am coppying multple files over. If I have 5 files and try to transfer them over at the same time, they take several minutes. But if I copy each file over one at a time manually, the whole process takes less than a minute. Very annoying. If there was some sort of way to have the files queue, I think this would vastly improve transfer speeds.

In a way, it's a relief to finally find this thread - knowing that I am not alone in my transfer problems. I have a 2010 iMac and time machine backups worked fine when I first got it...but at some point since upgrading to Lion last year, transfer speed has gone to crap. It doesn't seem to matter what interface either as I am having the same problem FIREWIRE 800. It's even at the point now where Time Machine isn't running.

I had switched to using Time Machine across the network to a Seagate GoFlex Drive connected via Thunderbolt to a 2011 Mac Mini - but that has since failed.

I'm going to try a new drive tomorrow because I just ran disk utility and the external WD My Book 2 drive had to be repaiered.

I guess all we can hope for at this stage is that this issue is resolved in Mountain Lion due in a few weeks.

It's pretty clear Apple isn't going to do anything to resolve this in Lion. :-(

This is completly ridiculous. I have been having the same issue for 2 years. I have gone nuts trying to fix this issue. I see you to Mitchell have the same issue. I cant believe Apple has not addressed this issue. ***. Have you had any luck in the past 6 days since your last post?

I bought a new Western Digital My Book Studio 2 (6 TB in RAID 0). I set it up in RAID 1 (Mirror) and installed the WD drivers. I set it as my Time Machine Backup Drive and I was able to backup 1.86 TB in less than 12 hours over Firewire. That was light years better than what I was getting before. Either the WD drivers fixed the problem or my drive was bad or both of those were true. I am in the process of getting the drive replaced as it is still under warranty.

Now I need to figure out the issue with my Mac Mini not recognizing my 1 month old Seagate drive over Thunderbolt.

I have just installed Mountain Lion on my i7 Mac and I'm very happy to report that USB copy speeds are much, much improved.

A 250Mb file will now copy for me in under a minute. Still pathetically slow compared to Windows 7, but a significant improvement over what I had to endure before in Lion.

I'm interested to see what other users are experiencing.

Cheers

Mitch

Hello Mitchell did you happen to test the copy speed on firewire 800. Also did you do a clean install or did you upgrade from Lion?

Hey theend22 ,

Just a normal install - an upgrade from Lion. I haven't tested firewire.

Cheers

Mitchell,

I just loaded Mountain lion also it seems a little smoother when copying but nothing like it was in snow leapard. I certainly see a lot less beach balls so far. Lion was just a train wreck.

Thanks for your input.

My 2 cents

Got a 2011 MBA to use on a location shoot this past weekend to dump images of my CF cards to a external HDD. Didnt bother to get one of the new one as I wanted lightweight and was only going to use this for dumping purposes and do quick reviews. Wow to my surprise it was going to take 4 hours to transfer a 16GB card to my external. I had 2 external HDD with me so I tried on both. I thought maybe its my card. I have 8 16GB cards and half are 30/mbs transfer and the the other half are 60/mbs. No combination would go any faster than 4 hours. I wanted to throw this thing out the window. So came on here and started reading through this thread. From what I was reading it was possibly a software issue. Thank God I had paralles installed with Windows 7 just for MS Office as i cant stand the Mac Outlook wont sync dates and emails with my .live accounts as it imports all my past emails as new. Tranfers done in paralles were as normal. 13-15 mins for a 16GB to an external. Windows saved my butt thankfully. So its not a hardware thing at all.

I just finish installing Mountain Lion and no differance in speeds from Lion. Not a happy camper at all. This MBA might just get traded for an Ultrabook

Well I have an update to this whole issue. I decided to try a SSD as a test to see if the hard drive might be the issue and man what a difference. I am able to write 8gb over firewire in 2min 10sec. USB took about 5 mins. Before that would have takes 20mins over fire wire and 40min over USB. I dont know what i was thinking. SSD all the way. I went with the Intel 520 SSD man its blazing fast. Bootup takes 7 sec's. and shutdown takes 2sec's. I will never go back to mechanical Hard Drives at least not on My Mac. Windows or Linux no problem. So that was my solution to this most aggrevating issue.

hey just tested your theory and still the same. Tried copying the same card over to the local hard drive first which is the 256 ssd and got the same speeds. No luck for me i guess

3.09 GB took now 6 hours from iMac to USB (brandnew, clean Mac-formatted with DiskUtility)

This is HORRIBLE slow

PS All software updated to newest from Apple, NO other USB things running, tried several USB plugs on my one year old iMac (20GB RAM, 250 HDD)

I SOLVED this problem.

It has to do with the filesystem a mac harddrive is made. its difrent than a fat32 or ntfs.

So when you transfer to NTFS you get slow write speeds. why? cuz it has to reformat them first, and you looze speed. but this should be both way's. with writing and reading of files. but its just with the writing to a NTFS HDD. so. the problem should be in a software doing something it should not be doing. like.... cashing.

the coping goes thru a smal plrogram called MACfuse and NTFS -3G

programs you shoud have installed in order to see other external HDD's.

-Go to your system information panel

-search the NTFS-3G app

-unlock the hanger at the bottom left corner

-enable "file system caching'
-and for more speed uncheck the second one 'filename normalization'

-everything else should be left unchecked.

this did it for me 😉