Just purchased the Seagate thunderbolt adapter for desk top, with 4TB back up plus drive. Installed the drivers provided by seagate for larger than 2TB drives. Tried to copy a 91gb file, and expected it to take no time at all. With an advertised transfer speed of 10gb per second, it should take 10 seconds. Its taken 45 minutes. Can anyone help me?
MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I would uninstall the Seagate drivers - you shouldn't need them.
I have LaCie (owned by Seagate) 2big Thunderbolt drives and get pretty close to advertised speeds - and that's without any special drivers for use on the two 4TB drives on one of my units.
Clinton
Should I then reformat the disk itself?
That shouldn't be necessary - the drives aren't the problem: it's the Thunderbolt hardware and the drivers that I believe are the problem (you could always reformat the drives if you wish, of course, but I believe it to be the installed drivers that are bogging you down).
Clinton
How Do i just uninstall the drivers? When I didn't have the drivers, my computer said it couldnt read the drive.
Now that's unusual - I have no problem reading/writing to Seagate 4GB drives. Perhaps the drive isn't formatted for Mac use only and the drivers are allow NTFS access? Open Disk Utility, select one of the 4GB drives and see how it's formatted. If not "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" then refomat it as such.
You'll need to know the name of the drivers before you can uninstall them (unless Seagate has some nifty uninstall app) and you may need to contact Seagate in order to find out just where those drivers are installed and why they think that you "need" them.
Clinton
It is formatted correctly. I have no problem either, but they sent a flash drive with drivers on it for the Adapter if you have above 2tb drives. I still think an hour for 91gb transfer is a bit much for the advertised speeds. The real reason I am concerned about the speed is that I use this drive to host my files for all of my Premier Pro, and other adobe programs.
The drivers, then. must be related to the adapter in some way, then. I've two Seagate 4TB Barracuda's (5900 rpm) in one of my LaCie enclosures and, as I said, I get good throughput on those. A 91GB file should take more than a 2-3 minutes or so, I would think.
I'm afraid that you're just going to have to get in touch with Seagate and ask then what sort of speed you can expect from this adapter. If you're not going to get even close to TB speeds, I would be looking at alternatives.
Sorry that I couldn't have been of much help...
Clinton
I started off with the same config and then I was really upset at speeds versus my internal SSD, but needed the storage. I now use firewire 800 on larger 2TB or 4TB drivs and when I am running sessions and working I use a screaming fast config.
GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter with CRUCIAL M500 SSD and it screams. I also use it for Final Cut X, Adobe Products, Parallels Virtual Machines, and transfer on quick TimeMachine backups here and there. I just swap them out as I need them. It's really your call. Just a screenshot of my speed currently with this config.
The SeaGate Thunderbolt Adapter is so slow!
