Why is my La Cie external drive so &*# slow

Factual Questions
1

I have

(1) an 80 gigabyte La Cie external drive connected by

(2) firewire to

(2) a Mac G3 running OS X.

My problem is that the drive is sometimes extremely slow. Specifically, when I try to move a group of files (approximately 40 at a time) from one folder on the external drive to another folder on the same external drive, it can take up to 60 seconds.

What happens is, I select all the files I want to move. Then I drag them to a folder. Then that weird rainbow ball starts spinning for over 60 seconds. Finally the files move to the new folder.

Anybody know what’s going on? It doesn’t seem to be a firewire issue, because these files are just moving from one folder on the external drive to another folder on the external drive. Is there some kind of optimization software I can try? Please don’t tell me this is some kind of problem with the drive. That would really be annoying.

2

Sounds like dumb software to me. The file moving program is probably moving the file from the ext. drive, into the computer, and back out to the ext drive. It thinks it has to copy the files first (and that requires the roundabout route) before deleting the old. It isn’t smart enough to just change file pointers. Some file utils under MS OSes do this is well, but not others. Unixes tend to do this a lot (which includes you).

3

The hard drive isn’t slow: it’s the world that’s getting faster.