I am using an external USB drive for video. Is it possible to increase the speed of the drive to make rendering/copying/, etc., faster? When I have a couple of applications writing to the drive, and I open up the hard drive in the Finder, it takes awhile to load the files/folders.
How to speed up a USB external hard drive
hard driveusb
Related Solutions
Cocktail is an award winning general purpose utility for Mac OS X
This app does exactly what you are after (plus much much more), but it will set you back $15.
Alternatively, the command pmset appears to do this as well, but without the fancy GUI. For example pmset -c disksleep 60 will prevent all disks from spinning down within 60 minutes of activity when plugged in. You can change the -c part to specify a different power condition:
The -a, -b, -c, -u flags determine whether the settings apply to battery ( -b ), charger (wall power) ( -c ), UPS ( -u ) or all ( -a )
If your USB hard drive is the bus-powered variety (that is, you don't plug it into the wall for power), then it is possible that it is requiring too much startup current to run on one of your computers.
Some computers are pickier than others about how much current a device can draw, and over what period.
You might try a cable like this:
Basically, you can use power from two USB ports, instead of just one.
If your hard drive has a jack for a power adapter, use that instead.
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Best Answer
There's not much you can do to "optimize" your transfer rate. OS X should be maxing out your USB connection as it is.
If that's not fast enough you might want to look at a USB 3 drive (if you're not already using one) or a Firewire drive which will give you better throughput. FireWire enclosures are a bit more expensive but they're worth it if you need higher throughput (for say, video rendering, etc).