How can an external drive cause my Internet to slow to a crawl and then fail?

I came across this post while in search of the answer to the very same question only I am experiencing this problem when connecting to a USB 3.0 hub and nothing else. The resuling slowdown in my internet speed leaves me hanging intermittently between screens in Safari, sometimes indefinitely. When I remove the USB cable, normal speeds resume. Activity Monitor shows no undue load on the CPU. I did not notice this problem until just recently. Could this have something to do with the recent OSX patch.

BTW: I am running a 2012 15" MacBook Pro with Retina display.

Anybody have a clue as to what might be going on here?

Gerry

Yes! Same thing happening to me. After a few minutes of internet use, with my external drive plugged in via usb 3, my internet performance slows to a crawl. I unplug the drive and it speeds backup. I have a G-DRIVE mini external drive using a USB 3.0 to standard USB cable to connect to my macbook pro.

Macbook Pro 17-inch, Mid 2010

OS X 10.8.5 (12F45)

Interesting timing on this post, Doug. I saw it this morning just before heading out to fry's to pick up a new router. My problem mostly went away after swapping out my Comcast rental box, however intermittent slowness persisted. I ditched the rental box yesterday and replaced it with a Motorola Surfboard cable modem, which so works great when directly connected to my MacBook via Ethernet cable. I'll reply to this thread later with results.

I'm getting the problem when connecting my iPad mini or iPhone via USB.

As soon as it's connected my internet speed reduces massively. It appears to be the ping rate that is affected. As soon as I unplug either of them again it increases.

My iMac is connected to my router via an ethernet cable so it's not wifi in this case.

If related I think it may be more of a generic USB problem. I have read numerous times that if you are having IT problems that disconnecting all USB devices is one of the first steps.

Hello,

I am running the latest version of Yosemite (10.10.4) available currently. I purchased a USB3 drive (Seagate backup plus slim 2Tb) the day before yesterday and wondered why there were such problems with the net connection all of a sudden.

When I connect the Seagate drive directly on the USB 3 ports on my Mac Mini (Late 2012), the internet connection comes to a near halt. If I connect the USB 3 drive to a USB 2.0 hub, there is no problem with the internet connection. I think this is really peculiar.

Harri

Well, in my case it was actually caused by the USB3 cable supplied with the Seagate unit. I happened to have spare USB3 cable available and just out of curiosity tested whether the cable would make a difference. The drive worked fine with my other cable. When I connected my USB3 memory card reader to the computer using the cable provided by Seagate, the internet connection (WiFi) dropped again. I returned the cable at the shop and got a replacement cable. Now I can have both the Seagate drive and the memory card reader connected to the USB3 ports without problems. Hope this may help some other users with this same problem.

Your response helped me. - I just moved my laptop to another room and now it connects when using my external drive. I wish I would have Googled this earlier, it would have saved me a lot of time because I could not Buy a photo book that I had just created with an iPhoto that had the library files on my external drive. I had to create a new iPhoto Library on my laptop, move all the pictures to my laptop and disconnect my external drive then rebuild the book so I could connect to Buy it. I'm not sure what changed. I've been sitting at the same table for 2 yrs and had my external drive connected daily. I figure it stopped working about a month that's when I first noticed intermittent slow downs and had not associated it with my external drive until earlier this week. Thank You.