Slow copy speeds to USB in Lion

Thanks for your advice Tzetzi, but this is not the problem.

Copy speeds to and from Macintosh hard drives formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled) to USB drives formatted the same (Mac OS Extended journaled) are pathetically slow.

This has nothing to do with FAT32 or NTFS formatted devices or third party drivers such as NTFS-3G. And Macintosh users shouldn't have to go down the road of third party drivers anyway.

In fact, copy speeds to FAT32 or NTFS formatted partions are, for me, slightly faster than to and from mac native formats.

As I've said previously, it seems the Mac OS is particularly sensitive to different chip sets in third party hard disks and USBs. Some USBs (Kingston for example) are so slow it literally can take 3 minutes to copy 25 Megs of data. Others while still much, much slower than windows counterparts, are much faster (emtec for example).

I along with lots of users had copy speeds that were just fine in Snow Leopard. Lion destroyed that and Mountain Lion while slightly better, is still slow.

Regards

Have you tried my approach?

I run OSX 10.6

It did it for me, i got 2x the speed after these settings...

have a try, hopefully it will work for you too.

I'm with Mitchell on file system formats. What is scary is I never had this problem under 10.6 (clean install). In fact, I backed up my system and reinstalled 10.6 to double check - file copies to usb hard drives and thumb drives in both NTFS, FAT32, and OS extended journaled all worked fine. Then I reformatted and installed 10.7 - guess what? Yep - back to slow file copies. Basically Apple screwed up USB transfer between Leopard and Lion.

Conspiracy theory take: they are purposefully screwing up USB so we'll all upgrade to computers with lightening ports. Either way, I can't believe Apple hasn't addressed this. Every Mac forum on the planet has hundreds of users with the same problem.

I am a Mac novice, but having tried about six times to use time machine to backup to a variety of USB 2.0 128GB flash drives, on two MBA from 2011. All attempts failed after 10-20 hours having only written about 4-5 GB out of the 50 required. I thought the problem was possibly in the flash drives, so bought 64GB USB 3.0 versions and both ran just fine. We have two MBA. Mine backed up 55GB in 2+ hours and the other finished in about an hour.

The first set of flash were generic, from somewhere in China. The ones that worked are Corsair Voyager GT 3.0. Wish I knew if this is a Mac issue or with these particular flash drives, but this discussion makes we wonder about Apple now......

kthtx,

You can stop wondering. Apple is in essence not any different from Microsoft; they are after profit & volume and don't care about their power users or a few people who experience bugs.

Be happy that part of your operating system works and stop complaining; that's basically the message.

Unfortunately I completely agree with jur9en.

But it's not power users Apple care about anymore. They are systematically dumbing down the entire OSX architecture and if that means issues such as those experienced here, well, tough.

Yes, Apple have become too big and too arrogant.

The trouble is, there is just so much that no longer works properly in OSX.

What a shame, I used to love this company and the products they produced.

[sigh]

This is more than sad and reminds me of the early nineties when a few people inside Apple at upper levels tried to scupper the company. This is not rocket science. I bought 2 of the fastest 16gb usb sticks I could get and they take an increasing amount of time to copy large files - for example a 3.5gb file starts at an estimated 12mins but by the time this estimate has crept to an hour and less than a quarter has copied across I just have to give up. At this stage I would love to be less of an apple afficionado and be able to just move to windows or linux but I am an apple developer as well so I am more or less tied to the platform. It would be nice if some of apple's billions went to pay a few people to monitor and escalate these issues. I have other major issues like photoshop cs6 having problems with my wacom tablet which also appear to be mountain lion related. Maybe it's time to go back to carpentry, farming or something more practical...

And what's even sadder - today, two days later, I'm copying across about 8gb of stuff and the same usb stick is now fast! wtfigo! 2 minutes to copy 1.3gb... I spent ages the other day trying to speed things up, unplugging devices, bypassing the usb hub, not rebooting as I just don't have the time nor the patience to do that. I do switch off every night so it could well have been that the restart solved it but - is that okay apple? Are we now back to the 'reboot to solve issues' situation? I sometimes just despair... how much time have I wasted tap dancing around these sorts of issues? How many times do I have to help others who are themselves tied up in knots with similiar things?

Well as frustrating as all this is...I found a solution to my problem today.

I was running snow leopard and everything was fine..then lion was loaded and it went to h_ll.

I purchased a new Transcend RDF8 USB card reader, updated the firmware from their site and my write speeds for my 32gb Compact flash cards are back on track.

As someone mentioned earlier...finicky with chip sets I bet! Thanks Apple…if the user experience wasn't so enjoyeable while using your machines, I would have defected a long time ago...

Let me add for giggles I just tested the old USB 2.0 card reader with the firmware update from Transcend…and it really is a OS update. The card reader is working fine again. "Just sayin"

Tzetzi!!!

THANNNNNK YOUUU VERY MUCH!!!!!!

You Approach really helped!!!

I was killing my self about the slow USB transfer in my External HDD partitioned for Time Machine, and the Rest is formated as NTFS. NOW with this (NTFS for mac) Program, I disabled the Paragon NTFS Driver Off

The Defaul Drive of NTFS for Mac is running again ...

well, My write and copy speeds are back! thank you!

Now I am experiencing a new issue with my Firewire drives…the read write speeds are SO SLOW 14 hrs for 142gb and via USB with a newer drive 67 minutes. This experience never happened before!

ANY IDEAS anyone? APPLE SUPPORT?

Im using mountain lion 10.8.3 and I am in the process of putting an ssd into my 2007 imac. Trying to copy my 146 GB iPhoto library to an external USB2 HDD with the finder, the dialog reported that it would take 2 days!

I have seen in this thread all sorts of remedies but none worked for me, what did "work" for me was to ditch the finder and use tar. This cut the time down to two hours. It would seem that this excludes the notion that this is a USB driver issue.

howto:

cd /Volumes/NewUSBExternalDrive

tar cvzf pictures.zip /Users/MyUserAccount/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library

For usb harddrives (any brand, any model) , I consistently get about 1 GB per minute copy speeds. Now plug in a USB thumbdrive, and the speeds vary greatly based on the type of thumb. For exampe, I have a Sandisk 32GB thumbdrive and it will copy at 1GB per hour!🙂 However, I have a 16 GB Kingston, and it copies slower than harddrives but not all that noticable. Well, that's what I see!

Very nice thread.

Let me share my experience. I have a MacBook Pro 15' from mid 2009, and the latest Lion (10.8.3). I'm copying a large iPhoto library (300 GB) from an 2 TB external disk to the Mac using USB, connected to **the two** Mac USB ports (the famous Y USB cable).

It started the copying at 3.5 Mb/s and this would take about 24 hours to complete. After a few minutes, it came to 1.5 Mb/s, bringing the finish time to "2 days"!!! (what?!?)

I was expecting the worse, somehow the copy was slowing down, just like quick sand. I kept the copy running on, while I started to search for a solution here at the forums.

I can't precise when, but after a while (20 to 30 minutes) into the copying, the transfer speed came up to 40 Mb/sec !! And now it says it's going to finish the copy in 2 hours.

I didn't do specifically anything special, other than keeping only Chrome running (just because Safari somethings gets to 100% CPU); and kept all Finder windows closed, just for the sake of it - in my silly mind maybe Finder is causing some trouble with the transfer.

So there you have it. The bottom line is that I had to wait for 20-30 min in order to discover that the copy would be OK.

Greetings.

all external drives are slow because spotlight starts indexing the whole drive when you connect and continously keeps indexing it. I would suggest you disable spotlight for external drivers in system prefrences -> spotlight -> privacy