Cloning slowness?

[neilio]

I'm wondering if others could pipe in with what kind of copy speeds their seeing on their systems over Firewire 400? It seems like copy speeds for me have dramatically slowed down on my system (from an average of 30-35mb/s to around 7mb/s) and I'm not quite sure what happened to cause this.

My setup:

20" Intel iMac (first gen)
Firewire 400
Stardock U6-1 (the OEM version of the WiebeTech Traydock) with a WD WD4000KS SATAII drive

[dnanian]

In general, Power PC Macs get about 4-6MB/s on a full copy, and Intel Macs get 8-12MB/s.

30-35MB/s would be quite high unless the effects of Smart Update are taken into effect...

[TMay]

neilio

I'm about in the range Dave mentioned, though mine more often runs more in the 8 to 13 Mb/s range on a full copy. This is PPC on F/W 400 to an external 7200 rpm drive, Oxford 911 chipset. If you went from making almost no changes between Smart Updates to making a bunch, you could see the variation you are reporting.

[back2mac]

I have an iMac G5 - 1 gig ram - and have used SD for around a year and I too have noticed a dramatic drop in copy speed with 10.4.8.

The copy time has gone from less than an hour to over 2 hours and most SD backups corrupt my LaCie external HD to the extent that it won't mount.

[dnanian]

You're very likely encountering a hardware problem, back2mac. Anything else on FireWire?

[sdsl]

Originally Posted by back2mac

I have an iMac G5 - 1 gig ram - and have used SD for around a year and I too have noticed a dramatic drop in copy speed with 10.4.8.

The copy time has gone from less than an hour to over 2 hours and most SD backups corrupt my LaCie external HD to the extent that it won't mount.

I guess my comment is anecdotal here also, but it turns out that I waited and only just updated my daughter's iMac G5 to 10.4.8 a short time ago. Her disk has about 25 Gig of files. The Smart Update on that iMac under 10.4.8 now takes 9 to 10 minutes, as it has very consistently for the previous versions of 10.4, and a portion of that 10 minutes is taken with fixing permissions which is automatically included in my SuperDuper runs. This is with a Firewire 400 external drive, which I boot from, now and then, to run Disk Warrior. I checked earlier logs from SuperDuper for this timing information -- it's been the same basically since the earliest version of Tiger.

[back2mac]

Originally Posted by dnanian

You're very likely encountering a hardware problem, back2mac. Anything else on FireWire?

I believe you may be correct. Since your post [thank you for your prompt reply] - I have tried disconnecting the LaCie drive, Tiger is now fine.

If I do mount the drive - if I delete the SD backup - the drive responds correctly. Perhaps that partition is faulty.

[back2mac]

I reformatted and partitioned my LaCie external drive and ran SD.

12.2 gig backed up in 17 mins. 30 at a copy speed of between 12 and 13 meg p sec.

This compares to over 2 hours before the re-partitioning.

[dnanian]

Great, glad to hear it.