New 4T G-Drive with Thunderbolt is very slow with Time Machine

G-Technology G-DRIVE
1

After receiving my new G-Drive, I hooked it up to my iMac i7 with Sierra (OS10.12) through the Thunderbolt port and have begun backing up about 500 GB of data. After running over night only about 125 MB was transferred.

What could I be doing wrong to cause this sluggishness?

Thank you for your assistance,

Hank

2

Hank,

Slow Time Machine backups are usually an issue with the way Time Machine does its backup. There are a few things you can do to speed it up. One of them is to stop the backup in the preferences and then start it up again with the icon on the top bar. Sometimes just restarting it causes it to kick into gear and go at a proper speed.

You can try hooking it up over USB to see if you get any better performance for a first time backup.

3

Thanks Rydia for your quick reply. I did switch to USB and will see what happen. But after the first hour, it has transferred 12.7MB of data. This seems slow to me.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks again,

Hank

4

Hank,

You can try transferring a file across to your drive manually to see if you get slow speeds. I would suggest finding a sizable file over 100 or so MB at least and transfer it. It should go across almost instantly on both USB and Thunderbolt with that drive. If it is slow during that process it would mean there is something wrong in the drive and it should be replaced. However I believe this to be an issue with Time Machine.

Apple has a known issue with the speed of their backups and have posted an article to their support pages here: Slow Time Machine backups

5

Rydia,

Again, many thanks! I think we found it! I turned off Kaspersky and now its flying!

Best regards!

Hank