[geeks] Intel Mac Mini - Horrible USB2 drive performance

[velociraptor]

On 5/24/07, geeks at litfire.com <geeks at litfire.com> wrote:
> Bill Bradford said:
> > Are you running them through a USB1.1 hub, perhaps?  I have no problems
> > with USB2.0-attached disks on any of my Macs (PPC or CoreDuo).
>
> Well, thanks for the confirmation that it's not the platform as a whole.
>
> I've got the drives directly plugged into the Mini.  Cables that came with
> the drives.  System Profiler says "up to 480MB/sec", so I'm assuming that it
> knows it's USB 2.0.
>
> No indication of problems in the system.log, and while I could see the
> chipset being a possible issue (the Cavalry uses a JMicron bridge), but I
> guess my best path is probably to take the issue up with Western Digital,
> since I think that Apple will point first to the drives, and Cavalry is
> cheap crap with an Engrish website.

I'd google for info on the USB bridges.  Back when FW400/IEEE1934
first came out, there were a number of bridges that didn't comply with
the spec, and all the Mac folks got on the "only buy Oxford 911
bridges" bandwagon.

You might also want to try a test with higher quality cables, as I
know I've had weird issues with cheap USB and FW cables on my
computers, both Macs and PCs.

=Nadine=