What is a best estimate of the amount of data "spanned" per hour in a best case scenario?

Paul Rappaport shared this question 10 years ago
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How long does the spanning process take? Right now mine looks to be moving about a gig an hour which sucks because I have 120 gig left to move


I'm spanning from my Mac to a Western Digital MyCloud and it is ridiculously slow, I realize speed is subjective and depending on equipment and settings, just trying to figure out the problem...

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Thanks for getting in touch.


The speed it takes to span is totally subjective to the setup.


If your transferring over the internet rather than over a local network, it would take much longer than a local network. But, a local network would still be slower than any wired connection. And obviously a hard drive over Thunderbolt will be much faster than over USB.


So, in copying a file TuneSpan should be basically as fast a when copying through the Finder. But, that's not all the spanning process is. TuneSpan also need to update each tracks location in iTunes after the files is copied.


The file being over a network could make iTunes take slightly longer for each track since it will need to check for the file over the network. But, that slowdown should be pretty negligible.


There are other factors that could be slowing down the location update in iTunes though. If you have any devices like iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs, etc connected in iTunes during the span, that can slow things down. Having the Get Info or Preferences windows open in iTunes can also interfere with these "update location" AppleScript commands that TuneSpan is sending.


So, there are a variety of factors, but it is most likely due to how you're connecting to the hard drive. With these kinds of drives, you can usually connect over a wire, at the very least connect to the drive directly with ethernet to the computer to communicate with the drive more quickly. If it's convenient, you could connect to the drive over a wire when spanning, and then be able to access all of that media wirelessly when you're not copying new files over.


You should be able to notice if the slowness is more during the copy phase or the update location phase depending on if you see the progress bar moving steadily but slowly (that's when it's copying) vs sitting still for an extended period (that would be when it's updating a location in iTunes).


Please let me know if this information helps, or if you have any further questions. I'm sorry I can't give you a magic solution, but the cause should be explained somewhere in this information.

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