Poor external firewire drive writing speed

Sofad · #1 January 24th, 2008, 07:11 AM

Hi,

i have a problem with my external hard disk. The write performance is very poor. It's an Western Digital MyBook, connected via Firewire to an G4 Yikes (PCI) 400Mhz Powermac.

Reading from that disk is fast (16 MB/sec) writing to the disk is below 1MB/sec.

I'm running Panther 10.3.9, the external drive is fresh formatted in HFS+ Journaled.

I tried 3 different firewire cables, the external hard disk is connected to the power. The speed is the same on both firewire ports of the powermac.

I disconnected all other peripherales, if i duplicate a file on the internal drive the speed is ok (i did that to check if the internal drive has problems).

see the attached benchmark for details...

ps

today i tried another 40gig external firewire harddrive, the same thing. fast read, slow write speed...

Any ideas?

Thank you...

Soulwar · #2 January 26th, 2008, 05:10 PM

Your bandwidth problem is probably due to the USB 1.1 of the Powermac. The upload limit is 1.5 MB/s for USB 1.1
Also, the Western Digital external drive is for USB 2.0

Sofad · #3 January 26th, 2008, 05:57 PM

hi soulwar,

the wd is an external firewire hard drive and connected to the powermac with a firewire cable...

the reading speed is nice (16MB/sec) just the write is annoying (0.9 MB/sec)

**Giaguara** · #4 January 26th, 2008, 07:02 PM

Try copying with Terminal, "cp" or "cpmac" (cpmac for copying also resource forks over). Finder isn't the most efficient with dealing with everything, and copying operations are no different from samba in the sense that for both the underlying system works, but Finder is sometimes slowed down or buggier.
I suspect you'll get way faster speeds with command line copying.

DeltaMac · #5 January 26th, 2008, 07:29 PM

The PCI G4 suffers from the same limitations as the Blue&White G3. The FireWire bus is an early implementation of IEEE-1394. You can't boot from that FireWire, and the performance of the firewire bus is definitely sub-par.
I think you could use a PCI FireWire card and get much-improved performance.

Soulwar · #6 January 26th, 2008, 07:36 PM

Sorry... It's been a

day. I think my brain (and your firewire) is going at USB speed...

It could possibly be the Powermac. From what I have researched, some users report slow (USB speeds) with some of the older Macs with firewire. You have had 2 different external drives and different cables, but with the same results. Unless there is a problem with the ports themselves or something else in the Powermac...?
Sorry I haven't been much help. But at least your post is back on page 1...

Take the good with the bad!
Good luck!

ex2bot · #7 January 26th, 2008, 07:56 PM

FWIW, cpmac is no longer necessary. As of Tiger ( IIRC) cp copies resource forks.

Doug

ElDiabloConCaca · #8 January 26th, 2008, 10:13 PM

I had this same problem on a G4 Yikes! machine when I first got my iPod photo 60GB -- using the built-in FireWire ports yielded dismal write speeds (about 1MB/sec). The only cure I found was to install a PCI FireWire card and use the ports on the PCI card, and that's when I saw speedy FireWire transfer speeds.

DeltaMac said it straight when he said the FireWire implementation on those machines (the B&W G3s and Yikes! G4s) is an early implementation and possibly not fully compatible with the IEEE1394 specification. The only workaround I know of is to get a Mac-compatible FireWire PCI card and use that with the FireWire hard drives.