Slow 3.5.1 Vault Creation

Hello,

We am using an iMac, 4GB, 1TB HD and have recently upgraded from OSX 10.6.8 to 10.9.4 and Aperture from 3.2.3 t0 3.5.1. We have a managed library of 400 GB on an OWC Firewire portable drive. I replaced our portable USB vault drives with two new WD 2TB My Passport for Mac drives. I reformatted both drives (Mac OS Extended - Journaled), copied some large files between them, verified them with Disk Utilities and ran WD’s drive diagnostics and all checked out OK. The file I copied between them was an old vault of about 400 GB which took 9 hours.

I created a new 3.5.1 vault on one of the new drives. Very soon into the process the beach ball appeared and Activity Monitor said Aperture was not responding. Nevertheless the disk light indicated activity and the file size in Get Info was increasing so I let it run. However the rate of increase of the file size gradually slowed down until there were long waits between increases. It ran for a total of about 26 hours but finally finished. Activity Monitor reported there were over 800 Aperture hangs during that time.

I wondered if this vault was useable. So I imported 99 jpegs into 3.5.1 and let it update the vault. Immediately there again were the beach ball and the not responding message, but the disk activity light was blinking and after 4 1/2 hours the update was completed.

I still wonder about the vault. I knew that creating it on a USB 2 drive would be slow but 26 hours seems very excessive particularly since I was able to copy a similar size file (an old vault) between the USBs in 9 hours (aren’t vaults just special copies of the library?). 4 1/2 hours for a small update (adding 99 images to 99K) is totally out of line with my past 3.2.3 update experience in which about 30 minutes or so was typical. I don’t know if this behavior indicates an Aperture of Mavericks problem or both.

I would appreciate any insights out there as to what might be going on.

Thanks.

Mike