7300 G4/jaguar Second Drive Problems

New2Vienna

Registered
I wrote my original posting on a 7300 running OS X 10.3.9 (with XPostFacto) using a Sonnet 700MHz G4 processor with 1 GB memory and two 80GB ATA drives connected to an ACARD AHard PCI Ultra ATA/133 PCI Interface. The second drive is loaded with iTunes files, which I've had no trouble playing from the application on the boot drive. Both drives are journaled HFC+.

Since my original posting, I have managed to install Tiger on my boot drive, which has solved a vexing problem accessing the second drive. The problem was the when I tried to use the finder to access any of the folders in the top directory on the second drive, I got the revolving beachball until I forced a finder relaunch. I tried a couple of other good drives, always with the same behavior. And it also happened when I hooked up an external drive with firewire. However, when I accessed the drives over my airport network from another machine running Tiger, I was able to navigate anywhere in either drive, The problem occurred only with the finder on the 7300. I reinstalled the OS, installed all updates, zapped the PRAM, and done the usual drive repairs and directory rebuilds on both the boot and iTunes drives but the problem wouldn't go away.

Last night I managed to get Tiger installed, with the help again of XPostFacto, and the access problem is gone. I don't know whether it was Panther on this machine or a persistent flaw in my installation. But it's gone now.

However, although Panther seemed otherwise to work normally, and so does Tiger, the finder became noticeably slower altogether after I upgraded from Jaguar, and it still is in Tiger. This doesn't seem to affect iTunes performance, but I'd appreciate any advice on what I might to do to speed up the finder.
 
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