After Leopard Upgrade Ext HDD runs slow

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Hi All,

Since I upgraded to Leopard the other day, my 500GB Iomega external hard disk (which is formatted HFS/J) has been running intermittently slowly. For example, copying over about 30MB worth of DMG files took 12 minutes!

I tried rebooting, turning off Time Machine, setting Spotlight to avoid indexing the disk, all without any luck.

I'm also have problems connecting a second Lacie 250GB that's formatted FAT32. The computer simply refuses to even mount it since upgrading.

Does anybody have any idea what's going on, if not how to fix it?

Thanks!

J

Update: I've started a disk verify and repair. It started with a 35 minute estimated time, and jumped to an hour, 3 hours, and now its at 5 hours...

Update 2: It's been stuck at 5 hours now for the past 2. I'm starting to wonder if this is a drive issue, a Leopard issue, or a Leopard-caused drive issue... I'm remiss to simply reformat the thing given the data that's on it...
 
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spilio
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Here's a grab of the disk utility...



The last status given was "Checking Catalog File." Anybody have any clue what's going on?

J
 
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Given the lack of response, I'm inclined to believe this is either completely isolated to me, or isn't an OS problem at all -- in which case, I'd appreciate it if a mod could move this thread to the Other Hardware and Peripherals forum...

Thanks

J
 
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Well, I decided that the data on the drive was lost and tried to reformat it... Took 5 hours for Leopard to "check the disk" before I abandoned hope of reformatting on the Mac and took it over to my PC.

Windows reformatted it NTFS, and since then I've done quite a lot of moving files, big and small, to and from, without any issues. The drive is running like a dream, and so I wonder why Leopard was having problems with it.

I'm gonna try hooking it back up to the Mac to see what happens.

Feel free to chime in any time...

J
 
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Your mac might not like ntfs.....
 
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I've been having weird access issues with my external Firewire 750GB HDD. Files seem to be VERY slowly copied about half the time. I have had similar slowdown issues when I tried to use Disk Utility to check permissions and eventually aborted the process, which itself took over an hour to abort. Also, after the Leopard upgrade it takes forever for my MacBook to show the external HDD's contents in finder. The MB accesses the drive over an Airport Extreme network connection which is hosted/shared by my Mini which is also running 10.5. The external HDD is dual interface with Firewire 400 and Hi-Speed USB 2.0 connection ports and now that I have started connecting it via USB it runs flawlessly. Weird...
 
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Your mac might not like ntfs.....

During the time of my problems the drive was formatted Mac OS Extended Journaled.

I only later reformatted on my PC in order to ascertain whether this was a hardware issue or a Leopard issue. Considering how well the drive is operating on my PC (and how well it operated under Tiger beforehand), I do believe it's a Leopard issue.

I've been having weird access issues with my external Firewire 750GB HDD. Files seem to be VERY slowly copied about half the time. I have had similar slowdown issues when I tried to use Disk Utility to check permissions and eventually aborted the process, which itself took over an hour to abort. Also, after the Leopard upgrade it takes forever for my MacBook to show the external HDD's contents in finder. The MB accesses the drive over an Airport Extreme network connection which is hosted/shared by my Mini which is also running 10.5. The external HDD is dual interface with Firewire 400 and Hi-Speed USB 2.0 connection ports and now that I have started connecting it via USB it runs flawlessly. Weird...

It sounds exactly like the same issues I've been having with my Iomega, except being single-interace, I can't switch to Firewire... You think it could be a port issue? I did try on both of my USBs...

Additionally, I have a FAT32 USB Lacie that Leopard won't mount at all.

I'm crossing my fingers that 10.5.1 will solve many of these problems... Do we have any idea when that's due out?

[rant]
I can understand a newly released OS being a little buggy -- but in all my 20 years running PCs (from MS-DOS, up through every variant of Windows) I've never had issues with basics as properly recognizing and reading disks...

Sheesh...
[/rant]

J
 
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I believe it is Leopard as well. Currently, I have added the External disks I use to Spotlight's ignore list and that seems to have sped thing up considerably. My startup and shutdowns were markedly slower with externals attached and this fixed the problem.
Dave
 
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Well, my problem didn't manifest in the form of slow startup or shutdown... Otherwise I would have downgraded back to Tiger in a hurry. I'm really hoping the Leopard update comes out before the end of this month (and fixes this problem) because I'm headed back to Russia for several months and have to pay enormous sums for bandwidth...
 
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This sounds a lot like what Adam was talking about on MacCast Loop the other week- where drives with a cheaper non-something (don't remember what) Firewire chipset do not seem to perform well when "talking" to Leopard's firewire driver.

You may want to hunt around:
http://www.maccast.com
 
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I swear there is something in the Leopard code that says "act weird until x number of re-boots, then behave like Tiger". Since my last post, my HDD problems have disappeared and I did nothing to fix it. And this was before the 10.5.1 update. Weird, but I'm not complaining. Maybe it just takes a bit longer to housebreak and domesticate a Leopard. LOL
Dave
 

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