I Got Dem Ol' Slow Data Transfer MacBook Blues Again Mama
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
by Charles W. Moore
Back in April I posted a ‘Book Mystique column about my adventures cloning my 2.0 GHz unibody MacBook’s hard drive of to a SimpleTech Duo Pro 1 TB external hard drive using its USB 2.0 interface (the Duo Pro also supports FireWire 400 and 800 and eSATA transfers, but of course the poor MacBook is bereft of any of those superior alternatives).
Using Mike Bombich’s excellent Carbon Copy Cloner utility, which has worked well for me on Power PC machines with FireWire 400 ports, I was dismayed to discover that the clone run for the not quite half-filled 108 GB partition took more than 24 hours to complete — far, far longer than it took for roughly the same amount of data to be copied when I cloned my 1.33 GHz PowerPC G4 PowerBook’s drive to the Duo Pro over FireWire 400.
The clone attempt was successful, and I determined that it was bootable, and least technically. Startup using the SimpleTech drive over USB took about 10 minutes, and performance, if you can call it that, once the boot was completed mimicked the speed of continental drift. It would be understatement to say not practically usable.
Several readers wrote with theories, some noting that while USB 2.0 is real-world slower than FireWire 400, the difference I observed was extreme. It certainly dissuaded me from cloning the drive again any time soon, and I’ve reverted to doing backups to my SimpleTech Pininfarina 500 GB drive using Time Machine supplemented with manual dragging and dropping files to my other laptops via Ethernet, which is satisfyingly speedy. The Time machine runs are pretty sluggish as well, but not prohibitively so, and the Pininfarina drive only has a USB interface anyway.
That first clone non-was done from the rearmost (closest to the screen) USB port, which I learned is not fully powered, so I thought it was worth a shot to try again from the other USB port to determine whether that would speed the process up. I didn’t get around to trying until last weekend, when I had a little spare time breathing space, so I connected the Duo Pro again and let carbon copy clone or do its stuff.
Alas, I fared no better this time. Once again cloning the MacBook’s drive, which is still less than half-filled, took more than 24 hours. I made sure that Spotlight indexing was disabled for both of the Duo Pro’s drive partitions, so that was not the issue, and I’m still no closer to knowing what is other than that it wasn’t my choice of USB ports.
In the closing summary of my first article on this topic, I lamented that I had very little optimism that Apple would restore FireWire support to the MacBook, still had to wonder: “what were they thinking?!” Happily, my pessimism on that matter was misplaced, and FireWire is back on the new 13 inch MacBook Pro. Unfortunately for me that isn’t any help for the machine I have, which I don’t anticipate replacing for another 2 1/2 years, so I will be obliged to work around the pokey USB issue until then.
Evidently, this issue is not unique to my rig or even to MacBooks.
A poster on an Apple Discussions forum complains “it will take over an hour to transfer 3 gigs from my usb 2.0 drive to my internal hard drive.. thats not right. I have a brand new MAC PRO quad 3 GHz.”
Another on a osdir board reports: “I’m suffering of slow transfer rates with my MacBook Core2Duo (NOT PRO) and my external hard disk, which means, that I can’t get a transfer rate over 6MB/s. On other computers I could get a transfer rate of about 20-30MB/s.
Oon the Overclockers site, a white MacBook owner says: “I have a USB 2.0 USB drive which blitzes along on the computer at work. However, when I transfer stuff to and from my Mac at home, it’s really slow! 300MB takes over 10 minutes, when it takes seconds at work.”
So maybe it’s something about Apple’s USB implementation.
There are plenty more complaints out there, and whatever is the cause or whether there may be more than one cause, I never experienced this sort of issue with my FireWire external drives, or for that matter with SCSI drives back in the day either.
And now that the new 13” MacBook Pro has FireWire restored, I’m even more annoyed with Apple for leaving it off the 13” MacBook, since it’s now obvious that there was no engineering impediment to including it. As I said, “what were they thinking?”
Speaking of slow data transfer throughput, responding with uncharacteristic dispatch to widespread user complaints, Apple has released a firmware update for its mid-2009 MacBook Pro lineup that addresses the issue of Serial ATA throughput speeds that were unintentionally cut in half to 1.5Gbit/sec. much slower than the the 3Gbit/sec typical of the SATA interface. Of course Apple has thus far declined offering eSATA I/O ports on its systems, but third-party ExpressCard and PCI adapters are available.
It wasn’t really a major issue for most MacBook and MacBook Pro users, since data transfer rates supported by traditional hard drives don't come close to outstripping a 1.5Gbit/sec SATA interface, never mind a 3Gbit/sec interface, but some SSDs could be bottlenecked as well as data throughput when connecting multiple devices via hubs.
It turns out this was a matter Apple could quickly addressed with a firmware update called MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7, which allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple notes that it has not qualified or offered drives requiring that much bus speed for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.
For more information, visit:
http://support.apple.com/downloads/MacBook_Pro_EFI_Firmware_Update_1_7_
FFor detailed information on this update, visit About the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7 and iMac EFI Firmware 1.4 Updates here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3561
I only wish there could be a fix that easy for speeding up data I/O on my MacBook!
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