The USB2 ports on my old G5 were....glacially slow.
They always seemed as if they were about as fast as the USB1 ports on the G5 tower. And even though I had external drives I almost never used them except for storage because they were so darned slow. You couldn't watch a video stored on one or use it for anything of substance.
Now my Corei7 iMac I never expected the USB2 to be any significantly faster - I mean USB2 just isn't that spectacular these days of 2010.
I noticed a definite change though: my Roland VG-99 (a V-Guitar system for music production) that connects via USB used to slowly read in all 400 patches and it was really painful on the G5 to do any patch editing.
On the i7 it's significantly noticeably faster. I wouldn't say it flies like an SR71 but definetely much more like it. You can use it now and program
patches without wanting to kill yourself.
In fact, just as a test I tried watching a HD video file off of one of the external SATA's I have connected via USB. It's fast enough to watch the video without it pausing and choking or seizing altogether like it used to. It's solid and smooth.
Even copying files back and forth - it's not as fast as Firewire800 or copying files over ethernet but it's MUCH less painful than the USB ports on the older computer. It's usable now.
Example:
The processes below took 20-30 minutes or more on the old G5. I did a backup of my iTunes directory that took over 16 hours once (165 gigs).
Copying a 3 gig directory of files from an external USB2 sata drive to another USB2 sata drive took just under five minutes.
Copying the same 3 gig directory from one of the external USB2s to the internal sata drive of the iMac took 3 minutes.
Copying the same 3 gig directory from the internal SATA drive to the fastest external sata mechanism connected via usb2: about 2.5 minutes.
Has anyone else noticed this? Could it have been the USB ports on my G5 were having problems of some sort causing the slowness?
Or is it in the move to Intel motherboards and processors the USB2 process is more optimized than it was under the old PPC motherboards allowing for faster throughput.
I never thought I'd say this but USB2 on a Mac is usable now.
Copying a 3 gig directory took under five minutes whereas before on the G5 would take half an hour possibly or more.
They always seemed as if they were about as fast as the USB1 ports on the G5 tower. And even though I had external drives I almost never used them except for storage because they were so darned slow. You couldn't watch a video stored on one or use it for anything of substance.
Now my Corei7 iMac I never expected the USB2 to be any significantly faster - I mean USB2 just isn't that spectacular these days of 2010.
I noticed a definite change though: my Roland VG-99 (a V-Guitar system for music production) that connects via USB used to slowly read in all 400 patches and it was really painful on the G5 to do any patch editing.
On the i7 it's significantly noticeably faster. I wouldn't say it flies like an SR71 but definetely much more like it. You can use it now and program
patches without wanting to kill yourself.
In fact, just as a test I tried watching a HD video file off of one of the external SATA's I have connected via USB. It's fast enough to watch the video without it pausing and choking or seizing altogether like it used to. It's solid and smooth.
Even copying files back and forth - it's not as fast as Firewire800 or copying files over ethernet but it's MUCH less painful than the USB ports on the older computer. It's usable now.
Example:
The processes below took 20-30 minutes or more on the old G5. I did a backup of my iTunes directory that took over 16 hours once (165 gigs).
Copying a 3 gig directory of files from an external USB2 sata drive to another USB2 sata drive took just under five minutes.
Copying the same 3 gig directory from one of the external USB2s to the internal sata drive of the iMac took 3 minutes.
Copying the same 3 gig directory from the internal SATA drive to the fastest external sata mechanism connected via usb2: about 2.5 minutes.
Has anyone else noticed this? Could it have been the USB ports on my G5 were having problems of some sort causing the slowness?
Or is it in the move to Intel motherboards and processors the USB2 process is more optimized than it was under the old PPC motherboards allowing for faster throughput.
I never thought I'd say this but USB2 on a Mac is usable now.
Copying a 3 gig directory took under five minutes whereas before on the G5 would take half an hour possibly or more.