Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
I am attempting to copy a 30GB file from a WD internal 500GB HD (backed up to an identical HDD with Time Machine) on my 1.6 GHz PPC G5 Mac running OSX 10.5.8 (1.25 GB RAM) to a LaCie 250GB external drive using FW 800. It's been several years since I've done this type of copying, and it seems to be going steadily, but very slowly. The original estimate was over a day, and it seems to be keeping to that pace.
Any ideas?
Power Mac G5, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
I thought about taking that thing apart once and looking, but never did. Down to the last 6 hours of the second folder; once again, apparently a normal copy except for the excruciatingly slow speed. I'm dreading the final folder- 47GB.
As a followup, I opened Disk Utility and it was able to read the actual brand of drive in that LaCie enclosure- a 250 GB Seagate ST3250823A.
Ah, besiseds Seagate, it's an ancient ATA/100 drive withonly 8MB Cache... that's at least some of it, but not all by far.
There's some bigger problem here that really bothers me.
Oh, there's a problem, all right. I'm doing this copy with the USB 2.0 connection, and it's apparently copying at pretty much the same speed as the FW 400 and FW 800. The current 47 GB folder started copying yesterday after supper, and should be done sometime tomorrow evening.....
The drive, antique as it may be doesn't seem to be the problem. Something in the G5, Rather. I'm doing my Time Machine backup to the DS213 NAS, and it's been at it for two days. Started off at a pretty good clip, but by now (@30GB out of 297 remain) the speed is up and down, mostly down.
The Activity Monitor shows the G5's CPU as maxed out most of the time, with most of that taken up by "backupd" and Firefox (which is running the NAS OS, Synology's DSM, an adaptation of Linux).
The Console shows a few extremely repetitive messages:
Feb 15 10:29:37 G5 com.apple.launchd[1] (0x10a9b0.mdworker[13558]): Exited with exit code: 1
Feb 15 10:39:48 G5 mdworker[13582]: (Error) Import: Importer force killed!
and
Feb 15 11:22:26 G5 mDNSResponder[16]: ERROR: getOptRdata - unknown opt 4
Did we add all drives to Spotlight's Privacy Pane yet?
I have placed all drives in "Privacy" on Spotlight, including the shared volume on the Synology NAS, excluding only the drive in the G5 being backed up to TM. I have gone so far as to unmount the "B" internal HDD that was the former TM backup drive.
Checked the backup again 45 min. later- there is no doubt that Spotlight was a big part of the problem. Speeds are now in the 4-6 mbps range, rather than down in the 2-4 kbps.
I think I'd even add the internal drive until you're done copying.
S-l-O-W copy
