Slow Copying Speeds With Flash Drives on Mac OS Lion

I find copying to my flash drive from my macbook and imac which has been upgraded to Lion from SL really really slow. I’m taking about 1GB taking about 5-7 minutes.

Portable USB hard disk works fine on the system though. And the same flash drive on windows is fast. Any ideas or any workaround this problem? I can’t find any solutions on the internet. :frowning:

Is that USB drive NTFS-formatted?

I had the same issue last night, was trying to copy a .mkv full-hd movie onto a USB stick, so my Samsung TV series 5 could recognize the stick.

This is my first Mac, I’m a noob, so I found out about the file system differences, the hard way (no NTFS out-of-the-box for Mac users).

So I found NTFS-3G and FUSE (http://ntfsonmac.com/) that enables you to format in NTFS from your Mac (and, respectively, read/write), but I just noticed the same thing you did: after formatting my USB in NTFS from my Mac, it was taking like 50 minutes to copy a 9 GB file to it :expressionless:

I haven’t tried formatting it NTFS on Windows and then reading/writing to it from the Mac (with something like NTFS Free). Neither did I test that USB stick on Windows, after formatting it NTFS on the Mac.

Ok, I went a little overboard with my story, but just wanted to share my experience. I too, would need to know if there’s any (safe) solution to this (if anyone wants to say exFAT, please don’t).

P.S.: I’m on Mountain Lion.

update on this thread.

Well, I actually read some online forum and some said the reason it’s slow is because spotlight is constantly indexing your thumb drive. So to disable spotlight from indexing your thumb drive every time you copy something, go to system preferences > spotlight > Privacy . Put your thumb drive in the privacy list and that should do

Thanks for that.

Did it; don’t know if it affects it or not but I’m currently using NTFS Free to read/write to NTFS drives and I’ve formatted the USB stick in Windows.

Either formatting in Windows or disabling Spotlight have cut down copying time of a 9 GB file from 50 minutes to just 10.