I'm having some trouble with some new gear and was wondering if someone could shed some light on a technical situation I'm having.

So after using up my 320 gigs of external storage, I went ahead and ordered a 640 gig Western external from NewEgg.com. Received it, and after plugging it in to my 2005 Powerbook with the Micro USB to Reg USB it wouldn't fire up. I took it to work to test and see if it was the external or my computer that was fudging things up, and after hooking it up to my work PC, it fired up with no problems. I was told it's probably a power issue and it needs more juice to run on my mac. I tried a double USB cable and that was a no go as well. I then ordered a powered Belkin USB hub and it fired up and my computer recognized the external right away.

However, I went to back up some work on my computer (30 gigs worth) and it gave me an estimated transfer time of 10 hours. No way.

Would anyone know what the problem could be? Could upgrading the cable to a firewire help, or was this situation doomed from the start and I should just try and send this external back for a replacement?

It sounds like the unit is operating at the slowest speed possible under the 1.1 standard (1.5/Mbps). Even at this speed it should be able to transfer the 30 gigs in roughly 4.5 hours. Although you can take the time to transfer algorithm result with a grain of salt, then have never done a good job of calculating transfer time.

Is the hub USB 2.0 compliant? What about the enclosure the drive is contained in?

The Mac specified should have USB 2.0 so you should be able to hit the higher speeds. I would look at getting a powered enclosure and drop the hub, one less thing in the chain.

Was this 640 WD an external drive or just a drive you put in an existing enclosure?

Thanks for the help Jacunda. As far as the hub, I don't know if it's USB 2.0 or not.

The external is a self enclosed unit, not a drive I dropped into an enclosure.

When I tested it on the PC at work it was about as fast as I would have expected. I'm guessing my hub is giving the power it needs, but not the speed maybe because it's a USB 1.0.

Is there a way I can get some more power to the External with just a regular hookup to my Mac?

Is it possible the external was set up for a PC only, without me realizing it?

Unfortunately this is a common issue with Powerbooks of that era. They meet the USB power spec, but just barely. External bus powered drives often need a bit more power to spin up and the Mac simply cannot supply it.

You could try running the "power" end of the double USB cable into your hub and then put the "data" one into your Mac directly.

The speed issue might also be a write caching problem. If the OS has disabled write caching on that drive your speeds will be terrible, especially if you are copying many files.

Washu, thank you for that advice. I will try the double USB into the hub in a bit. As for caching problem. Can I re-format the external to fix something like that? At first I couldn't copy anything to the external. I tried running a bunch of the disk utility apps to see what I could come up with, but the repair utility froze on me and I had to quit it. Eventually what I did worked, but I was left with that really slow copy speed.

Tried the double USB with one end in the Mac, the other in the powered hub. Drive made the same noise it did not getting enough power. The only other thing I can think of is my Hub is USB 1.0 and is helping slow everything up. I'll look into a USB 2.0 (which I should have in the first place) and see what happens. Thanks for the help on here though, I appreciate it.