What is the standard tool to test your hard drives read/write speeds? I'd like to test my new SSD to see how fast it really is. I've heard you cant trust XBench for that which is the only thing I have to use.
I am purchasing an external usb powered passport drive for Time Machine backups. How do I optimise drive to keep up the performance as I have noticed once the drive is full its performance drops dramaticaly.
My external drives transfer very slowly on my MacPro. I've been searching for answers and have turned up very little.
Just to make a note, I measured my disk speeds with both AJA System Test and copying files between drives and reading the Disk Activity in Activity Monitor.
I have 3 external drives, all MyBook Premium or Professional, 1x 500GB, 1x 1TB and 2x 1TB in RAID 0. I had them on Firewire 400 and the RAID 0 2TB one on Firewire 800. My transfers on FW were all around 24MB/sec on all drives (much less than what I should be getting with FW400). I then read somewhere that the FW bus on the MacPro uses the slowest speed connected for all FW connections. So I unplugged everything but the FW800 Raid 0 drive and my transfer rate jumped to 40-60MB/sec. This is much better, but still about half or so of what I expect it should be producing from an external RAID 0 setup.
To keep my FW800 backup drive faster, I've plugged the other two into USB2.0. The transfer speeds on both drives are now hideous, around 10-15MB/sec. This is so slow, but I'm not sure what to try to fix my speeds.
The HD's in the external drives are all 7200rpm, and all should be transferring at a higher rate. Do you have any suggestions or ideas? Ideally I'd like to get everything transferring at rates they should be transferring at, but I'll settle with my current FW800 speed of 40-60MB/sec if I can get my other two drives transferring at a non-snail pace.
Is this a common issue? I can't believe I'm the only one plugging multiple external hard drives into their Mac Pro. I hope someone has a fix or solution for this. I'm all ears!
System: Mac Pro (early 2008) Mac OS X (10.5.5) 3.2Ghz 8-core - 16GB Ram - 4x1TB SATA - GeForce 8800GT - Dell 30" 3008WFP A02 - Gateway 21" FPD2185W - 3xMyBook external drives
I have an external Lacie 1 TB hard disk which used to operate at USB2 speeds, but ever since I upgraded to my my Intel Mac Pro (from a G5) it only operates at USB1 speeds regardless of which USB port I plug it into. When I open up System Profiler, it reports "speed up to 12 Mb/sec" which of course is only USB1.1. It used to show "speed up to 480 Mb/sec". Do I need to reformat it something? Can I force it to connect at USB2 speeds?Â
Info: Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2 x 2.66 Dual Core
I have this odd problem on my i5 MBP. When I have no external drives attached AJA System test reports my SSD speed at about 227mb/s read and write. When I plug in a USB external drive the SSD reports the same speed. When I plug in a FW800 drive the speeds jumo to 234 - 245mb/s. When I unplug the FW800 drive they go back down.
I have some questions to ask about my MacBook Pro (15" 2.66ghz mid09). It's running under 10.6.2 fully updated.
1) My optical drive sometimes keeps making this noise every 10sec even without a disc in it, is it normal?
2) My hard drive sometimes makes this noise even when there is no disk activity (I checked with Activity Monitor.app), again is this normal? I remember hearing the same noise on my old PC when there was some heavy disk activity; but on my Mac it does it for no reason.
3) Can you recommend me a fan control software for Windows 7? Having to boot on OS X, set the fans at 5000rpm and reboot every time I want to do some gaming is pretty tiring
4) I was making a little video with iMovie today, I only added a photo and a mp3 file but suddenly my computer started getting slow, that's when I noticed it was actually taking 2.20Gb of memory.
5) Can you recommend me something that would give me the same mouse acceleration curve as in Windows? I tried SteerMouse, USB Overdrive, MouseFix and ControllerMate but none of them gave me a satisfying result. It makes me feel that my new Kone mouse is totally useless.
6) I have low transfer speeds to/from USB drives, around 5Mbytes/sec while my friend with his 2006 HP laptop could achieve around 20Mbytes/sec with the same USB drive. No, it's not funny.
I will be getting a refurbished mac pro soon and was wondering if i should do anything to get the most out of my mac. I cant remember where ive heard this but some people suggested defragging the computer right away and doing a clean reinstall of leopard and partining a hard drive with xp/vista. And was wondering if these are good ideas to consider. Or maybe there are other ideas I haven't heard of that will also work.
I recently purchased a 3.2 mac pro with 24gigs of ram and a 1tb hitachi drive.I scored this bay for 4000.complete with two years of applecare left..Now my question is how do I get this baby to purr.
Hey so I just got a MacBook in September and I want to keep it fast, clean, and working smooth for the years to come.I want to do all the things possible regularly (maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks, maybe more often) that will help optimize the performance, speed, and everything else on my MBP and keep it clean and working smooth... If I download Onyx, I don't know what "processes" to do and something might happen or get deleted if I check off something for Onyx to do. So could you tell me specifically what to do to just make my MBP faster, cleaner and all that like I said before.
I'm hoping someone can offer some experience and valid advice on setting up my system to maximize it's performance for editing with Final Cut Studio 3.
My projects are generally small (less than 100GB each). With the following hardware I'm hoping to optimize for performance for the next 12 months.
We'll I've just installed a new hard drive today, after finally taking the plunge and opening her up. I've cloned my external usb disk to the new disk, as I didn't really want to do a fresh install. I say though my macs seen better days, its running slow, likely for 4 years worth of stuff thats cluttering up my hard drive and system files. I basically want to speed up the system and free up some disk space. Can you recommend any program(s), for cleaning, optimizing, or uncluttered that actually work well.
Today I went to plug in my Lacie 250 GB USB external hard drive into my 13 in. MacBook to get a shirt template for a design I am making. I discovered that the hard drive just would not mount and show on the desktop, and I remembered that this happened a few days before, but all I did was unplug it and plug it back in, and it worked... except that today, that didn't work at all. I tried the other USB port, and the hard drive showed up on the desktop for about a second, and then disappeared. I kept on replugging it back into both USB ports, but nothing happened.
Then I tried to see if it would work on the PC beside me, and it was recognized as an external device; however, a message came up telling me the drive was malfunctioning. I am guessing this is from ejecting it incorrectly (because I am in a hurry to head to my next classes...I use this laptop at school), but I have incorrectly disconnected it before in the past and this problem never happened to me before.
Every single project I have ever created for my design career is on that hard drive, and all I want now is to get my files back. All I need it to do is show up on the desktop for just the right amount of time for me to copy my files onto my computer.
I read online to put it into the freezer for a while and it should mount, but that didn't work. I tried using Disk Warrior, Data Rescue 3, and Tech Tool Deluxe, but the hard drive did not show up on any of those apps.I tried plugging the hard drive into an iMac as well, but it did not show up either.
I recently purchased the MCE OptiBay and am going to add a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500gig (BOOT DRIVE) to my Seagate 5200 500 gig (DATA DRIVE), already inside my MBP. I was reviewing URL and was interested in formatting the new 7200.4 into my Primary Boot Drive with all my data on the other old 5200.
My question is, What should my Boot Drive consist of? The OS and Applications or only the OS itself? Also I was looking to create a scrach partition..would this best on the boot drive or the data drive?
I've heard several people reference they have drastically improved their gaming performance by optimizing things in Windows 7. While I wait for mine to arrive I would love it if anyone can post their tips and advice on getting the most out of this mediocre GPU.
Got a new MBP last month to replace my white MacBook - loving it as an upgrade but one gripe - if I'm sat using it on my knee I regularly hear the "click" type noise of what I imagine is the protection of the hard drive because it thinks it is being dropped.
I never heard this on my old Mac and while it's not a huge issue it is a bit disconcerting, as though I'm being told off for moving it in a fairly responsible way.
My PowerBook G4 (Alum) died. I've had it for 4 years, taken it with me to Alaska and all over the lower 48, and have had nothing but happy experiences. I knew she was gonna go, but I was hoping she'd hold on until I could afford a MacBook. Alas, no. The problem appears to be the ability of the logic board to communicate with the hard drive. I can hear the HD spin, but even with Disk Warrior, I cannot locate it. The Mac Geniuses at my local Apple store confirmed this and gave me a shoulder to cry on. I've run Disk Warrior, Disk Utility, and tried finding it using the target disk mode - no luck.
The problem is that I've got 4 years of teaching materials, 6000 songs, and irreplaceable pictures on the HD, so I can't bring myself to just trash it. It's true that you only fail to back up you stuff once. This is my once. I've heard that with PC hard drives, you can just drop the old HD into a USB HD box and use it as an external HD. I can't afford professional data retrevial, and I want to give this option a try if it'll work with a Mac HD. Any ideas or suggestions?
How do i play media files from my external hard drive without transferring the files to my mac hard drive? I have a lot of media files and want to be able to play them soley from my external hard drive.Â
I just picked up the 2TB and I have a few questions about it. I also just recently talked to a buddy of mine that has the 500 or 1TB version of the TC, but it seems that the setup/options are a little different. For example I would like to just use the TC as N only on the 5Ghz band, but it doesn't allow for me to do that. I can check a box for the 5Ghz but it doesn't specify to use the N band only. The "transmit rate" is different as well. Now, I can only select low, med or high instead of 6mb, 10mb etc. What is the transmit rate and what can I do to optimize the TC for optimal performance? I wish I could screen share with someone so I can figure this out.
Ran verify disk, all OK. Ran permission repair, all OK. Ran Disk Warrior, all OK. Downloaded 10.7.3 and ran install. Update is now stuck on 'Optimizing system for installed software'.
When I play an embedded video in a web page in Safari, it invariably halts and starts repeatedly (not the audio.. it goes on smoothly while the video pauses then resumes in a few seconds in sync with the audio, then this repeats in a few seconds). This doesn't happen with youtube videos in Youtube, but embedded in blogs or Jon Stewart e.g.
I have an aluminum unibody macbook from October 2008. I'm looking to upgrade the 160 GB hard drive inside to a 500 GB one I'm considering from Newegg. Would it be possible to migrate/copy/clone the entire contents of my current hard drive to the 500 GB one? I also have a section of my current hard drive partitioned for Bootcamp. Would this affect my ability to transfer everything over?
If this is possible at all, how can I go about doing so? If there are steps laid out somewhere, I'd appreciate a referral. Sorry if my question is a little elementary, but I did a search on these forums and also google and nothing really came up
I know this is going to be an incredibly easy fix, but I can't find it. The Hard Drive on my new iMac is not appearing on my desktop, nor is it appearing in the "Device" menu in Finder.
I have just installed a new hard drive in my imac intel 20" (2006) and upgraded the memory and now the hard drive does not show up in the 'select destinations' folder of the install program. I can see the hard drive in the disk utilities window however it wont let me do anything.It is a seagate 1TB SATA II drive however it is displaying it as a 7.3 TB.I have tried to erase and partition and get the same error message each time, 'Input/Output error'. I have tried starting the thing with the install disk which is Mac OS X (Tiger?) which came with the computer
with cloning/copying the content one an external hard drive onto a new external hard drive. Basically, I have a 500GB FW400 drive which I use to store my media files. It's full, so I purchased a 1TB FW800 drive to replace it. Obviously, I thought I could simply copy and paste the media files from the old drive to the new one.I cannot copy the media files to my internal drive first as my internal drive is only 250GB and nearly full itself.I have used Disk Utility to attempt to close the old drive to the new drive, but keep getting "insufficient space" errors.
Recently I bought 2 identical WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drives for my macbook pro 13 inch 2010. My aim is to replace the internal hard drive with one of the two I just purchased and use it as my system drive with Lion, Windows and Data partitions. And for the other hard drive I want to use it as a full disk back up for the internal drive (now 1TB hard drive). After I was done with setting up both windows and mac and data transfer, when I booedt into the recovery partition from the internal drive to clone the drive to the external drive, the disk utility gave me this error (Could not validate source - error 254). I also tried using Carbon Copy Cloner but it only could clone partitions, not the entire drive. Yesterday I downloaded a copy of Clonezilla. It worked fine until it had to clone an exFAT partition (my data partition). The exFAT partition appeared as 'RAW' partition in clonezilla. As a result, the whole partition appeared to be full and clonezilla had to copy every single blocks of data in that partition and the estimated time remaining was about 30 hours. So clonezilla is out too. Just want to ask if there is any program/application (bootable or not) which allows can do a full disk clone to an external hard drive.
Notes. Failed HDD ASD Test.  A new hard drive was installed in September of 2011 after the previous hard drive failed. Having worked well until now the system seems to give the same problems as it had previously. I am wondering if this is a compatibility issue as others have pointed out. Â
I have been told by the technician my only option is to replace the entire hard drive again for the second time with a new one. However to my understanding a ASD test is very specific and this my not be necessary? Further I am attempting a final backup just in case. I don't have to take it in where I could just back it up myself without the system shutting down.
Had a hard drive failing/failure. I am having my bad hard drive replaced with a bigger hard drive. (New Obviously) I have an iMac. (1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 17-inch) To have my data transferred from the old drive will cost over a hundred bucks more. I am trying to save money but transferring it myself. All im looking to transfer is my photos. I did not have an external drive but i WILL purchse one now. My question, (to save some money) is how would i transfer my old pictures from my old drive, too my new installed hard drive. Can i use USB? Firewire?