Kindle 2 is very slow over USB on Mac
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Usually I like to post solutions to problems here – but this one I haven’t been able to figure out… maybe someone else has an idea? Please comment.
When connecting the Kindle 2 to a MacBook Pro via USB the connection is basically unusable. I get no where near the 480Mbit/s that USB2 would promise (and I checked in the System Profiler – the Kindle does show up as a USB2 device). I appear to be getting a few kbit/s – transferring a 3MB file takes 15+ minutes.
Doing some googling points to SpotLight as a potential problem. Since the Kinde 2 shows up as a FAT partition many of the usual ways of preventing SpotLight from indexing it don’t appear to work. Certainly disabling Spotlight for the Kindle through the Preferences tab failed for me (with the always helpful “an error occurred” message). What does seem to work is to create a file named .metadata_never_index in the root directory of the Kindle (something like
touch /Volumes/Kindle/.metadata_never_index
in a terminal window.
But even after doing that (and verifying that SpotLight is no longer trying to index the drive) transfer performance over USB is still abysmal.
Help?
