Backing up an internal 3TB HD (late 2009 iMac, 12GB RAM, MacOS Sierra 10.12.6) to a new, external WD Elements HD (MacOS Extended (Journaled), GUID partition map) over USB at ~500 kB/sec. Have I done something wrong to be enduring this speed?
Backing up an internal 3TB HD (late 2009 iMac, 12GB RAM, MacOS Sierra 10.12.6) to a new, external WD Elements HD (MacOS Extended (Journaled), GUID partition map) over USB at ~500 kB/sec. Have I done something wrong to be enduring this speed?
Your ports are USB 2, that will give you up to around 50MB/s. The speed there would be closer to USB 1 speed.
If you are copying lots of small files, it can go much slower than normal. Try copying a large single file over to it like a movie clip to see how fast the sequential transfer is. Also try duplicating a file on each drive to see how long each drive takes separately to read/write a large file. Hard drives typically last around 5 years, if the drive in the 2009 iMac hasn't been replaced, it's 8 years old and could be in the process of failing.
Backing up an internal 3TB HD (late 2009 iMac, 12GB RAM, MacOS Sierra 10.12.6) to a new, external WD Elements HD (MacOS Extended (Journaled), GUID partition map) over USB at ~500 kB/sec. Have I done something wrong to be enduring this speed?
Your ports are USB 2, that will give you up to around 50MB/s. The speed there would be closer to USB 1 speed.
If you are copying lots of small files, it can go much slower than normal. Try copying a large single file over to it like a movie clip to see how fast the sequential transfer is. Also try duplicating a file on each drive to see how long each drive takes separately to read/write a large file. Hard drives typically last around 5 years, if the drive in the 2009 iMac hasn't been replaced, it's 8 years old and could be in the process of failing.
It’s a shame Apple never designed the iMac for easy hard drive replacement by a user. My creaky old iMac is teetering near the edge also and getting a new one at this point is financially unlikely.
Backing up an internal 3TB HD (late 2009 iMac, 12GB RAM, MacOS Sierra 10.12.6) to a new, external WD Elements HD (MacOS Extended (Journaled), GUID partition map) over USB at ~500 kB/sec. Have I done something wrong to be enduring this speed?
Your ports are USB 2, that will give you up to around 50MB/s. The speed there would be closer to USB 1 speed.
If you are copying lots of small files, it can go much slower than normal. Try copying a large single file over to it like a movie clip to see how fast the sequential transfer is. Also try duplicating a file on each drive to see how long each drive takes separately to read/write a large file. Hard drives typically last around 5 years, if the drive in the 2009 iMac hasn't been replaced, it's 8 years old and could be in the process of failing.
Thank you. I have replaced the drive twice now. I have a myriad smallish files but have excluded about 1TB of small data files which I backed up previously. About 695GB of 1.85TB in about 16 hours, faster at least than my original estimate.
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If you are copying lots of small files, it can go much slower than normal. Try copying a large single file over to it like a movie clip to see how fast the sequential transfer is. Also try duplicating a file on each drive to see how long each drive takes separately to read/write a large file. Hard drives typically last around 5 years, if the drive in the 2009 iMac hasn't been replaced, it's 8 years old and could be in the process of failing.