OSX background copy?

T

times2

Registered
umm... i'm a mac newbie pretty much

i'd like to know if anyone else has had a similar experience to me,

i am trying to copy 80GB of video files from one firewire drive to another.

both good, new 7200 drives formatted with mac extended partitions.

while the copy is going on, the machine is so busy its unusable.

the finder is registering 30% cpu use.

this is terrible, any windows NT has been able to background copy for at least 7 years.

does mac firewire not have DMA?

or is the mac sick?

tibook 500Mhz, 512MB ram, OS10.2.3
 
Sorry, just so I'm clear... you're coping files from one firewire drive to another Firewire drive? OR are you copying information from an external Firewire drive to your laptop hard drive? If your using your TiBook it only has one Firewire port, in which case I think your speed degradation is probably due more to the laptop hard drive then the actual Firewire. And if this is the case, I have to ask, are you sure your laptop hard drive is 7200?
 
I'm sure it's because you're going from one FireWire drive to another -- FireWire seems to suck up CPU cycles like crazy, and the fact that you're doing reads AND writes, both by FireWire, is probably why you're seeing the slowdown.

When I'm burning an audio CD in iTunes by way of FireWire CD-R drive, my system becomes extremely unresponsive until the burn is done.
 
FireWire copying should _not_ hog the CPU at all. That was one of the biggest pros against USB-2.
 
fryke said:
FireWire copying should _not_ hog the CPU at all. That was one of the biggest pros against USB-2.
Click to expand...

i AM copying firewire-firewire using 2 drives daisychained to the tibook's 1 firewire port. both drives ares 7200RPM (120&160GB). it is hogging the whole machine for the whole time. not good.

has anyone any experience of doing firewire-firewire copies on mac OS 10.?

good or bad?

can anyone recommend a configuration where they have tried this and it HAS worked satisfactorily?

tim
 
I do this all the time with remarkable speed and performance. I guess speed and performance are the same thing in this case..um, moving on...

Sorry, no explanation here of why the trouble. All I can say is that it is not normal (for me). I have several Macs and they all haul ass when moving files around via Firewire (all permutations).

Aside:
I've got two DP machines, and I can tell you, that extra processor is unbelievable for multitasking. I can RIP, burn, download, render, print and more all at the same time with very little slowdown in general. The only thing that slows it down much is big time renders that use both processors, but even those free up the CPU when I ask for it and let me get back to work.
 
Perhaps the fact that your machines are dual-processor is why you don't notice any slowdown.

I really wanna say that I heard somewhere that FireWire was pretty CPU intensive, but I can't provide any links or anything to back that up.

times2: you DO mean that the actual FireWire copy is going full speed, but the machine just doesn't let you do anything else because of the unresponsiveness of the machine while the copy is going on, right? I experience the same thing when I burn CDs on my FireWire drive, but not while just copying off the drive. What happens if you copy something FROM the FireWire drive to your internal drive? What happens if you copy something TO the FireWire drive from the internal?
 
Huh... I did something like this with my PowerBook G3 in OS 9 years ago.... I daisy chained a DV Cam to my Firewire HD to my PowerBook, and it let me capture video directly to the FireWire HD just fine... then again... I didn't really dare any multitasking while this was going on. I suppose you shouldn't be too surprised that it's being unresponsive. Also, your PowerBook is a relatively old G4, like mine. These things ain't as spiffy as they used to be, eh? Dang obsolete-ness of death comes pretty quick to comptuers
 
This used to be an acknowledged problem by Apple which they seem to think they fixed with 10.1.2 (yes, that long ago) but I still read quite a bit about people still having the same problem. Apple's solution is to:
Apple said:
If the issue persists, use one of the following workarounds:

Copy smaller amounts of data at a time.
Copy the data from one FireWire device to a non-FireWire volume, then from the non-FireWire volume to your other FireWire device.
Start up from Mac OS 9 to perform the file copy.
Click to expand...
If you are unhappy with this send feedback to Apple about this issue.
 
I correct my former statement. I have not daisy chained FW drives and done a large copy, so I can't comment on that performance. I have multiple FW drives, each connected to the computer directly via the two main FW connectors or sometimes thru a PCI card with additional connectors. I cannot recall ever having any slowdown during transfers of any size and I do a lot of huge file size transfers.

I wonder if NO daisy chaining would help. Or if buying a cheap FW PCI card would help. I have no idea.

I love Apple's recommended solutions. It reminds me of the old joke...guy goes to the Dr and says "It hurts when I do this", Dr says "Don't do that".
 
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