My drive is slow

USB 2.0 and 1394a are the interfaces used on our current external drive models. They can provide good performance, but keep in mind that they are not as fast as a SATA or ATA interface. See the below table to compare the maximum performance of each.

The item that really sticks out on this table is USB 1.1 with only 12 Mbits/sec. USB 1.1 is very slow.

Also notice that SATA is measured in Gigabits per second and that ATA is measured in Megabytes per second. This table shows how much maximum total bandwidth is available per bus for each technology.
Advertised transfer rates are based on the fastest speed at which the drive can send data across the cable (or bus) from the drive buffer.

What This Means to You in the Real World

Many hard drive users mistake the "burst transfer rate" in the table above for what they can expect to see in real-world performance. This leads almost invariably to disappointment when their USB external hard drive does not transfer data at 50 MB/sec or their SATA internal drive at 300 MB/sec.
This is because no storage device will have all of this "potential" bandwidth available for data transfers. Some of the bandwidth will be shared with other devices on the bus and some will be consumed by commands and interface protocol overhead. Other limitations can include the transfer rate that is possible given the bus (ie, USB, SATA, Firewire).

It is also worth noting that poor or slow drive performance is usually caused by a system configuration factor. It is very rare that poor performance is directly related to the drive. In many cases, perceived poor drive performance is usually attributed to the results of a benchmark test. Benchmark results are very system-dependent and the results can vary from system to system. For this reason, Seagate cannot provide a single sustained transfer rate specification for any drive.

USB on a Macintosh

We are not aware of a way to determine through the operating system if your ports are operating in USB 2.0 mode. However, keep in mind that most G4 and older systems only have USB 1.1. Some of the G5 computers have USB 2.0 and very few G4 systems have USB 2.0. Check your user manual for your Macintosh to determine if your ports are USB 1.1 or USB 2.0. 1394 (Firewire) is a more popular high-speed interface on Macintosh systems.

1394

Our current 1394 hard drives are 1394a device so even if you are using a 1394b host adapter our device has a maximum throughput of 400Mbits/sec.

For best performance on 1394 do not daisy chain devices. If you daisy chain devices, you are sharing the bandwidth available on that port.

See the next page for more information and tips on increasing performance.

For more information on performance, please see our list of Knowledge Base links