Very slow emptying of Trash on external drive?
AES
bootable; never tested it), about 40 GB and 125,000 files in size, from
the internal HD of an Intel Tiger MacBook to an external 120 GB FireWire
HD, which also contained 20 or 30 GB of earlier stuff put there by a
Panther iBook G4.
Later on, no longer needing this backup and wanting to free up the space
for other purposes, I selected the folder containing the SK backup, hit
cmd-Delete, and emptied the Trash.
The process of emptying the Trash ended up taking somewhere in the range
of 6 to 8 hours. I could do other things on the MacBook while the
emptying process chugged along, but after listening to the external
drive clunk away, and watching the count of items to delete slowly drop
from 125,000 down to somewhere around 56,000, I gave up and went to bed.
Is this normal? The original backup that created the files didn't take
that long. Is there some other approach I should taken, that would have
left the other 20 to 30 GB of stuff still preserved on the HD?
Jolly Roger
You have posted this manually to multiple news groups, and now if
someone responds in one news group, you won't see that response in
others. What you should have done instead is put all news groups
(comp.sys.mac.system,comp.sys.mac.hardware.storage,comp.sys.mac.apps)
in the "Newsgroups" field, and posted it just once.
--
Apply rot13 to this e-mail address before using it.
JR
AES
overnight run of at least 10 hours duration with the external 120 GB
drive clunking continually the entire time, I stopped the Empty Trash
activity by clicking the stop button in the display window, with circa
20,000 files of the original 125,000 still to go.
At that point the Finder showed that the external drive seemed to have
recovered the free space corresponding to the deleted and Emptied files,
but not the ones still in the Trash, and my system seemed to be
operating normally. So, for no good reason except maybe to clean up
some cache files or whatever, I re-booted my MacBook, then restarted the
Empty Trash activity.
The remaining 20,000 files seemed to be deleted more rapidly, though I
couldn't stay around to check exactly how much more rapidly; and the
final result seemed to be all components in OK shape, for both the
external drive and the Mac.
I'm still wondering: What's the recommended procedure for deleting some
very large (say of order 50 GB) and very multi-file portion of what's on
an external drive, while still preserving other comparably large files
or folders that are also on the same drive? (Without erasing the entire
drive, that is.)
====================
In article <siegman-FCCB3B...@nntp.stanford.edu>,
Gregory Weston
Michael Vilain <vil...@spamcop.net> wrote:
> Well, I've notice that if I do a "secure erase" on HFS+ filesystems,
> it's _much_ slower because it's overwriting the data several times
> before it removes the directory entry and inode from the filesystem,
> especially with large files.
>
> Just deleting files is a directory update and inode update and/or
> removal which is very fast regardless of file size. If deletion is slow
> on this drive, I'd start wondering about the drive itself. Or the
> transport mechanism (USB is slower than Firewire).
A non-secure delete shouldn't take meaningfully longer on a USB drive
than a FW because there's really much data actually being transfered.
And for a large number of files it shouldn't really matter because
you're not really generally able to benefit from FW's advantage in
high-volume writes because it's potentially scattered all over the place.
I suspect the key lies in the OP's trash containing well over 100000
files. I've noticed that there seems to be a rapid growth in overhead
when I'm trying to delete a couple of thousand files in one shot,
presumably just involved in tracking all those files as they're deleted.
I kind of wonder what memory consumption was like during that overnight
deletion session.
G
AES
Gregory Weston <u...@splook.com> wrote:
>
> I suspect the key lies in the OP's trash containing well over 100000
> files. I've noticed that there seems to be a rapid growth in overhead
> when I'm trying to delete a couple of thousand files in one shot,
> presumably just involved in tracking all those files as they're deleted.
> I kind of wonder what memory consumption was like during that overnight
> deletion session.
>
Yes, if I ever have to do anything like this again, I'll trash just a
modest subset of the total set of files; Empty Trash; rinse, and repeat.
[Or, if the stuff I want to preserve is smaller in size, I'll transfer
that to some other storage, and just wipe the whole disk with Disk
Utility.]