copying files to SMB share is taking absurdly long under Catalina

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copying files to SMB share is taking absurdly long under Catalina

While performing some housekeeping on my home network's HDD storage devices, I became aware of when copying data from my iMac with Catalina to NAS storage that the copy time was way too long. One instance showed the estimated time in days!

To test if it was the actual HDD devices, etc. I tried a few ways of copying - a) HDD to HDD both attached to the iMac b) from iMac HDD to remote NAS storage device using SFTP and c) from iMac HDD to remote NAS storage device using SMB. I found that both a) and b) worked as expected - the copying taking seconds when HDD to HDD on iMac and just a few (1-2) minutes when using SFTP. The same files took 10's of minutes, to hours, when using the same NAS storage device but over SMB.

Can this be another SMB issue that was introduced in Catalina?

Posted on Oct 23, 2019 5:18 AM

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Answer 1

ksaro1 Author

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77 points

Oct 23, 2019 7:10 AM in response to ksaro1

Upon further testing, I think this could be a Finder issue? The files that are showing the odd behaviour, i.e. extremely slow copying times, are all iPhotos/Photos migrated libraries. These show in Finder as a single 'entity', that is Finder just lists the library as if it is a file, rather than listing the actual directory,

Upon copying to a NAS storage device, and I also tested scp from the command line of the iMac, the entire directory is traversed by sftp or scp. This results in a copy time of a few minutes for libraries that are 7-800 MB in size. When using Finder to copy, Finder copies what it considers to be a single entity, i.e. the library, and this takes an estimated hours (I've not let it finish because after 10-15 minutes it's already taken way longer than the other copy methods and I stop the process).

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copying files to SMB share is taking absurdly long under Catalina

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