Returning slow hard disks

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pingin

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Last week I bought three external hard drives (1 TB WD My Passport Ultra) from Komplett.ie. They're for backing up my Mac. Having tried one of them last night, I've discovered it's immensely slow, copying about 1GB per hour with Time Machine. It was a bit faster when using SuperDuper (nine hours overnight).

With more than 500 GB to copy, these disks aren't much use to me.

Komplett have a ten day cooling-off period in which you can return goods. Since I've obviously used one drive, I can't return that one. Would I be entitled to return the other two?

Many thanks.
 
I think vandriver's on the money here. Those drives can do over 70MB/s for large block transfers. Note that when using Time Machine, there's a lot more going on than pure data transfer, so the machine performance itself will play an important part in determining how long it will take. More here.

But, to answer your question, under the Komplett terms, you can return the other two unused drives within 14 days of receipt.
 
Leo said:
I think vandriver's on the money here. Those drives can do over 70MB/s for large block transfers. Note that when using Time Machine, there's a lot more going on than pure data transfer, so the machine performance itself will play an important part in determining how long it will take. More here.

But, to answer your question, under the Komplett terms, you can return the other two unused drives within 14 days of receipt.
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That's a useful article Leo. Maybe I should just keep them and bear with it. I had a couple of other WD disks in the past and they seemed to be a great deal faster. Mind you, my computer is very slow at the moment and is in need of a major overhaul.
 
pingin said:
That's a useful article Leo. Maybe I should just keep them and bear with it. I had a couple of other WD disks in the past and they seemed to be a great deal faster. Mind you, my computer is very slow at the moment and is in need of a major overhaul.
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Yeah, I think the issue here is most likely the time that the Time Machine software is taking to analyse the files and move them, not the move itself.

Try a test of just copying a large file/ folder over to the WD drive directly via the OS, without using Time Machine and see how long it takes. Work out the MB/s transfer rate. I'm betting it will be a lot faster than the Time Machine backups.
 
Leo said:
Yeah, I think the issue here is most likely the time that the Time Machine software is taking to analyse the files and move them, not the move itself.

Try a test of just copying a large file/ folder over to the WD drive directly via the OS, without using Time Machine and see how long it takes. Work out the MB/s transfer rate. I'm betting it will be a lot faster than the Time Machine backups.
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Thanks Leo. I'll do that. I tend to forget that you can just drag and drop!
 
USB 3 is rated for 625 mega bytes per second.Your gigabyte should have been transferred in no time at all.
 
vandriver said:
USB 3 is rated for 625 mega bytes per second.Your gigabyte should have been transferred in no time at all.
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That's the max burst transfer rate, I don't think any external drive will manage a sustained transfer much above 100MB/s
 
Leo said:
That's the max burst transfer rate, I don't think any external drive will manage a sustained transfer much above 100MB/s
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I'll bow to greater knowledge!
Even at 100 MB/S a gigabyte should only take 10 seconds(obvs) not an hour.
 
Did you buy the pre-formatted "for Mac" versions of these drives or the generic? One version of these Ultra drives has password protection and hardware encryption which might slow transfers down. Are you using USB 3 on the Mac and the drive? Using SuperDuper! (or Carbon Copy Cloner!) can you "clone" your internal HD to the external disk and use it as a start-up drive? This would let you use a simple benchmarking suite (GeekTool e.g.) to test the drive's performance against the internal.

To speed up back-ups (and restores if needed!) use CleanMyMac (commercial) or some of the freebies (CClean Mac, Maintenance, Alfred, Onyx, etc.) to rotate and purge log-files, temporary files, left-overs from install, crashes etc. If you inadvertently clear system, user or font caches using one of these programs, restart immediately.

To free up space consumed by unused language files use something like Monolingual (free) to clear them from apps and the system.

To help speed up drive performance use a reliable tool like TechTool Pro to rebuild the directory index. To ensure new drives work well with your OS, format them using the version of Disk Utility that Apple installed with it.
 
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Major embarrassment! When I got home I checked the USB ports on my iMac. They're USB 2.0 in fact. I was sure they were USB 3.0.

Not preformatted mathepac. I formatted them myself.

I started another test this morning. By 7.30am Time Machine had transferred 87 GB. Now, at 22.56 it's only up to 116 GB. The screen (but not the computer) was in sleep mode during the day but that shouldn't have affected it.

Leo, I did a transfer test just now. Moved a 26 GB folder to my WD Elements disk in the Finder. It took just over 22 minutes. Maybe that's how I should do my backups!
 
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I suppose the other thing to mention is that the first Time Machine backup will, by definition, be the longest and thus by persevering now, you are getting the heavy lifting out of the way. Any subsequent backup will be incremental and fast. For what it's worth, I use a Time Capsule for my Time Machine backups and can back up about 10GB's in about 25 minutes over wi-fi.
 
tallpaul said:
I suppose the other thing to mention is that the first Time Machine backup will, by definition, be the longest and thus by persevering now, you are getting the heavy lifting out of the way. Any subsequent backup will be incremental and fast. For what it's worth, I use a Time Capsule for my Time Machine backups and can back up about 10GB's in about 25 minutes over wi-fi.
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I think you're right tallpaul. I'll just persevere. Thanks to everyone for the replies.
 
pingin said:
Leo, I did a transfer test just now. Moved a 26 GB folder to my WD Elements disk in the Finder. It took just over 22 minutes. Maybe that's how I should do my backups!
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As Tallpaul says, Time Machine should get quicker for future backups as it won't have as much data to analyse and move, but it will always be slow. It all comes down to whether the added functionality in terms of whether that is time you're prepared to spend. Manual backups could be a pain, and you might easily forget to copy some files, restoring might not be quite so straight forward either.
 
Leo said:
As Tallpaul says, Time Machine should get quicker for future backups as it won't have as much data to analyse and move, but it will always be slow. It all comes down to whether the added functionality in terms of whether that is time you're prepared to spend. Manual backups could be a pain, and you might easily forget to copy some files, restoring might not be quite so straight forward either.
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Looks like I'll just have to live with it.
 
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