2.0 Upgrade is very slow.

It's extraordinarily slow for me too. Just tried to copy a 12.9MB file to my Amazon storage (local European bucket too) and it was telling me 2 hours. I'm on a very fast cable connection too. Transmit took around a minute to upload it.

Also, not being able to Get Info on S3 files and having to use the Contextual Menu plugin is pretty lame.

I really like the idea of Expandrive and would buy it straight away if it actually worked as described, but it just doesn't feel ready for a paid release at the moment. It still feels very beta.

Hi Jeff - thanks for the quick response.

Well, the progress bar showing the wrong information is a problem in itself, obviously.

But I did try it again and it took about 5 minutes, which is still quite a bit slower than Transmit – a 13MB file should be a lot quicker than that. This is also a problem if I have previews turned on in the Finder view (which I normally have for local drives) because it slow to load a preview, of course. I can turn this off whilst browsing the drive, but then have to turn in on again later.

In terms of the Get Info, I just get "You have custom access" in the Sharing & Permissions pane. Is there no way of showing the permissions here in the same way FTP apps do as a GUI (Transmit does this, for example)?

I agree the URL makes sense in the contextual menu though.

I really like the simplicity of Expandrive and I really want it to be the solution that works. I'd like to be able to set up a backup to my S3 bucket and know that it's going to be speedy and reliable. But I also need have a decent estimation of transfer times. When I'm copying from a laptop that I might be able to unplug and take somewhere I need to know if it's worth waiting around for five minutes or whether to cancel it.

Hi Jeff,

Hmm. That's an annoying situation for you, I can imagine.

I know you're trying to make this as 'invisible' as possible in terms of feeling just like a normal networked drive, but maybe a couple of custom GUI elements wouldn't be bad here as a trade-off. You must be able to tell how much is being transferred from your side of things once you have consumed the data and be able to get the transfer rate, or is this not possible? So you would, in effect show something more akin to an FTP transfer progress queue within Expandrive rather than relying on the Finder's one.

A custom Get Info panel wouldn't be so bad either - you could even set up an alternative custom keyboard shortcut to bring this up. (Incidentally, Dropbox shows the correct permissions in the Finder Get Info – I think they handle this differently though right? I think I'm not actually looking at the file on the server when I do that but the local version that gets synced).

Even if you do a custom get info from a contextual menu or the menu bar? Or maybe show the tree in the Drive Manager?

2.0 is also extraordinarily slow for me. I'm using the latest version of Textmate and connecting via SFTP to a dedicated server in Texas from California over a 16mbit down / 2 mbit up cable connection. Everything before the SFTPv2 beta driver was much faster.

Now I can barely launch Textmate. It crashes / "application not responding" the first few tries, everytime. I'd definitely be interested in rolling back to 1.x until these speed issues are resolved.

It's slow for me too.

Jon - Whilst I understand you're beholden to Amazon with regards the S3 services, the speed issue seems to be unrelated judging by the accounts of others here.

I don't quite understand how applications like Transmit are so much faster and yet they're performing the same tasks. Or have I completely misunderstood the way Expandrive works?

I'm getting similar Textmate hangs over FTP, but Cyberduck connects to the same server super fast. Also it takes minutes to transfer a few hundred K. Something is quite wrong here.

Yeah, it seems slower to me after the upgrade too... beach ball city when using TextMate over ssh.

Hey Expandrive admins, can I get a link to the 1.x (before SFTPv2 beta) .dmg? I'd like to downgrade until this is sorted out. It's unbearable.

nm found it. Anyone else who's interested:
http://www.expandrive.com/mac/release...

Ehh...it seemed snappier, at first...(it was, in fact, snappier) but then as I was viewing the contents of a directory, I was suddenly kicked one level up and all the folders in that directory (including the one I had just been browsing) were shown merely as aliases...

By closing the window, and starting over from the root I was able to get back to the folder I wanted to look at, but when I tried to upload a small file (less than 300kb) I got a spinning beachball o' death for about 30 seconds, and then what seemed to be a pretty swift upload (if you don't count the 30 seconds before it started).

So - a very mixed bag. I'm glad someone is working on it, but I really hope it's resolved soon.

Yeah its sloow for me too. Also makes finder in general slow and buggy. I really feel 2.0 needed to be tested a little longer.

That patch is faster, sort of. Some of it is the impression of being faster too (which counts for a lot in UI design, so I'm not complaining).

I'm not sure what the patch did but it looks like some tweaks to how the progress bar is displayed was part of it. I copied a 17MB file and the progress bar showed the first 15MB copy in about 3 seconds, which obviously wasn't the case.

Then the last 2MB slowed down until the entire file had copied, but continually showed "About 5 seconds" for about a minute. I assume that last bit of time was the actual copying happening and the first bit was internal caching?

However, the whole file copied in around a minute or so, which is a marked improvement.

Ah, scratch that. The copied files don't show up in the drive window at all. Even unmounting and re-mounting doesn't show them. They're not there when I look in Transmit either, so I assume they're not there at all and didn't actually copy.

In another thread Jeff Mancuso asked me to email him. He then sent me a reply that has a link to the newest ExpandDrive test build. I tried it out and it works GREAT for SFTP. Just as good as 1.3.4 on a 2MB file and much faster with a 101.5MB file. Around 6 min or so while my Time Capsule was backing up. This is through my Gigabit ethernet to my cable modem. I'm very pleased with the turn around I just hope they can get the fix out for everyone else sooner rather than later.

Thanks, but the latest patch Jon linked to above doesn't work for me. The files disappear as soon as they are transferred.

I'm a longtime MacFuse user and after the TUAW rave reviews about this product I had to check it out. Unfortunately I'm experiencing the same problem -- 2.0 (and 2.0.1) is incredibly unstable and slow. Often it crashes in the middle of a transfer which then makes Finder unresponsive. Terrible.

I downgraded to 1.3.4 and it works fine, but I'm fairly wary about continuing to use this product.

Ok so after taking the 2.0.1 plunge, im not having the same empty directory problems as my other thread however it is still kinda slow. In fact new files and folders don't show up until I manually refresh which never happened before.

So I tried the update and I must say it DOES fix a handful of the problems. Textmate will launch successfully more often than not and the wait times are shorter as well.

However, 2.0.1 is still MUCH slower than 1.x overall. Latency to initially open a file, speed to save a text file, and speed to save large files is greatly reduced. While I enjoy it that there seems to be much less risk of data loss / corruption that plagued 1.x + SVN in 2.0.1, the speed factor is pretty frustrating. My room mate (and co-worker) has regressed back to using Transmit (the FTP/SFTP client) instead of ExpandDrive just because of the beachballing.

Yes the project I'm using is rather large. However, I'm on a 22mbit down / 3mbit up cable connection (DOCSIS 3.0) to dedicated servers in Texas (from California) that have 100 mbit up bandwidth. I'm also using that plugin for Textmate that disables project refresh on re-focus.

Textmate still beachballs like wild on initial startup, saving files sometimes give a 5-10 second beachball, etc.

It's not so much that its unbearable... hell, I still use Expandrive everyday, but 1.x was much more satisfying despite the data-loss workarounds I got used to doing.

I've experienced this problem since downloading the new version, even after upgrading to 2.01. Every aspect of the program is slower than its predecessor from mounting to file transfers to navigating folders. There's a noticeable 3-5 second delay between opening new folders on a mounted SFTP. File transfers will sit and hang for minutes before even beginning transferring. If you choose to cancel the transfer it doesn't work. You have to force quit both ExpanDrive and the Finder to get things back to normal.

I have both a Mac Pro Quad 3 Ghz and a PowerBook G4 1 Ghz. I have the new version on my Mac Pro and the old one on my PowerBook. I set them both to transfer a file at nearly the same time, and the PowerBook completed a larger transfer before the new version got through hanging before beginning its transfer.

I'm using TextMate to edit on a VMware linux ssh server on my local machine, and where Expandrive 1.3.4 was instantaneous in all regards, 2.0.1 has a noticeable pause each time TextMate is focused.

Opening and saving files is still speedy.

I'm using MacFuse 2.1.5 (Beta).

I too am having big slowness with Textmate over ssh. My directories are not *that* large but each dir has a .svn folder an subfolders underneath so I am probably a victim of a known slowdown. Any ETA or workaround for this "." problem?