Question Slow External Hard Drive

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tmlb

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Apr 4, 2014
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Hello,

I have a MPR running 10.9.2

My 3tb western digital external hard drive is acting odd, I have installed any WD software. 120gb is partition to windows.

Recently the mac partion has been very slow on transfers, 2gb will take 40 minutes. When I run time machine, which is linked to this WD drive, it takes 3 minutes to back up 700mb, which is still slow but faster.

Transfer on the windows partition are fast.

When I run disk utility on the mac partition: No problems with verify. But repair disk brings up: Live file system is not supported"
When I run disk utility on the windows partition: No problems.
When I run disk utility on the hard drive as a hole: "This disk doesn't contain an EFI system partition. If you want to start up your computer with this disk or include it in a raid set, back up your data and partition this disk"

My external hd is connected to a usb hub, so i plugged it in directly and ran everything: it just disconnects.

I also reset all pram.

I realise the answer is most probably my hard drive is terminal but i just hope someone has a answer to fit it.
 

jFiveNYC

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Mar 28, 2014
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Is what you call the "Mac partition" HFS+, FAT or NTFS structure?

Time Machine can seem slow since it requires the backup to be kept in a sparseimage file. The backup isn't a simple A-to-B data transfer. Apple Time Machin doesn't do file compression. But it does consolidate the data and witchcraft to make as if the entire drive has been mirrior copied. And if not enough space is available to do this, it will slow down the process or inform you not enough space is available.

Most WD external drives use a Green or Blue series HDD spinning at 5400rmp further impeding a fast transfer. If a drive is nearly full to capacity, performance will be hindered.
 
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