Problems Transferring Files Larger Than 1GB Using SMB

Is your Mac going to sleep? This might possibly be causing the issue. Otherwise it sounds like this is a Windows question, not a Mac question. If it works when conducted from the Mac then I would stick to performing it that way. 🙂

I've been having the same issue... it's not a Windows question/problem... it has to do to with the poor SMB implemenation in Mountain Lion... do a few searches and you'll come up with a laundry list of people shouting at Apple to fix SMB in ML.

But as the OP mentioned... I'm having the EXACT same scenario... Mac to Windows copy works perfect... Windows to Mac copy results in "problem accessing..." errors.

I have been having this issue since I installed ML on both my mbp and mba. I cant believe that after 2 major updates I am still having this issue and have continued to deal with usb drives. any updates to this problem? bump

Silver5656 wrote:

I have been having this issue since I installed ML on both my mbp and mba. I cant believe that after 2 major updates I am still having this issue and have continued to deal with usb drives. any updates to this problem? bump

It's still hosed. Amazing that to avoid licensing fees, Apple would cut corners on such a critical part of the OS... you know... file sharing between the most common file sharing protocol known to man.

I've resorted to using this: http://www.thursby.com/products/dave.html

It's not cheap, but at least "it just works".

I know this an old thread but can't find anything giving a solution. I myself decided to wait until just a few weeks ago to update my iMac to ML and ever since I have this very issue. Sure glad I didn't jump on the bandwagon otherwise I might have had issues with something I use really often ... oh wait I have that anyway! yay me!

Most of the time it is larger files that fail but I have seen some smaller ones too. Wired or wireless makes no difference. About half way through copying roughly they just fail when going from Windows to OS X. Windows reports back as noted above as if the conenction is 'lost' but it obviously isn't as I can start the copy from the iMac and it works. However this all worked fine prior to ML install. I feel like all I bought was headache. Dad always said if it ain't broke .......

So is there some known fix ?

Just upgaded to 10.8.3 yesterday morning and last night for the first time in weeks since installing ML I was able to complete a file copy from my Windows workstation to my iMAC ! I know it is only one file but it is a good sign as it ALWAYS failed previously since the ML install.

We have 3 Mac Mini servers running 10.8.2 and all our Windows users are having exactly the same problem. I've tried disabling Write Caching on the Windows machines (as suggested in some posts) but the problem persists. I have just updated from 10.8.2 to 10.8.3 and tried again but it's still happening every single time. If I copy files over individually (and they're smaller than about 3GB) they copy fine but larger files or a collection of files larger than roughly 2GB always fails using the SMB shares.

Some posts have mentioned using the Samba SMB system on the Mac servers to replace the in-build SMB protocol but we need the fine-grained permissions settings of the standard Mac system.

Any help would be appreciated - there must be a fix for this show-stopper of a problem?

Yah, this was such a major issue for me I gave up and got rid of the Mac as a server... reliablity is way more important than a small, quiet box.

Well after more testing I find myself in the same boat as Bunnyfoot. Copying more than a single file at a time gets further but still fails at some point. One at a time is simply not an option. Lucky for me my server is my personal one and not business critical, I'm going to take other advice and switch the SMB out soon.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4430524?answerId=21543603022#21543603022&ac_cid=tw123456#21543603

Yes, I'm still having problems transferring large files from my PC to my iMac (running 10.8.3) over SMB. I sure hope Apple fixes this.

I just installed Dave 10 and it solved all my problems.

finally!!

spr4k3n wrote:

hi all,

i just want to share that i upgraded some of my PCs to Windows8, and to my surprise, this problem is all gone and the copying is much faster! my other PCs that were left behind Windows7 still experiences the same problem. now i am confused if this is Apple's bad implementation of smb or it's a conflict between OS X and Windows7. can someone duplicate this problem between pre-Windows7 versions so that we can have comparisons. thanks and cheers to everyone!

That's really interesting, because all of my machines are running Windows 8 Pro 64-bit and they all have this issue of not being able to copy large/sustained transfers... I don't have any machines running 7 to check if my issue is isolated to just 8 or not. Can you say what flavor of 8 you're running?

I eventually just went to using SMBup which... 1. gave me better speeds then when I was using the built-in OS X Windows Sharing, and 2. Has been 100% reliable as far as transfers go... I can copy 10GB files with ease. The only issue with SMBup is the fact that Windows machines don't show up in the Finder like when you're using the built-in method.

with ML 10.8.4, I also facing the same issue, I think Mac should take this issue seriously...

oh crap - I got all excited when I saw a 10.8.4 update that said it fixed a saving issue with SMB. I guess it didn't fix this?? grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.