Using a USB thumb drive is painfully slow in Mojave and Windows computers

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Level 3

778 points

Using a USB thumb drive is painfully slow in Mojave and Windows computers

I'm getting repeated issues with USB sticks on my iMac, using Mojave. The thumb drives are also used on Windows computers; I've already tried removing them from Spotlight searching.

Basically whenever I try to use a file on the USB thumb drive, it'll open slowly, save slowly, duplicate slowly, and so on - as in, saving can lead to 2-3 minutes of a spinning wheel. I'm getting this with Excel (xlsx) files, Apache Office (ODT), and PDFs. (I'm not saying it's fine with other programs - it's just those are the main ones that I use.) This has happened with a succession of different thumb drives bought over the past few months, so it's not just one bad drive.

I use these USB thumb drives on my home computer (Mojave); on my office computer (Windows) at work; and at a number of different classroom computers (Windows) at my school. The drives are bad on all of these computers. Any tips on how I can isolate where the problem is coming from, and how to fix or avoid it?

Thanks!

Posted on Mar 1, 2021 2:08 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Owl-53

Level 10

102,037 points

Mar 1, 2021 2:22 AM in response to Lost in Asia

Thumb Drivers are inherently slow and unreliable but if that is the only options perhaps the drive needs to be reformatted to exFat ( work on Both macOS and Windows )

On macOS Format Flash Drive Mac with Disk Utility

Connect the flash drive that you want to format.
Go to Applications and Utilities and launch Disk Utility. ...
Select your storage device from the list on the left and click on the Erase tab. ...
With everything set, you may click on the Erase button to start the formatting process.

On Windows To format a USB flash drive using File Explorer, use these steps:

Open File Explorer.
Click on This PC from the left pane.
Under the "Devices and drivers" section, right-click the flash drive and select the Format option.
Use the "File system" drop-down menu and select the exFat option.

There are inexpensive SSD with USB -A connections that can be used in same manner - faster and more reliable too plus greater storage space.

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Answer 2

steve626

Level 6

13,635 points

Mar 1, 2021 11:58 AM in response to Lost in Asia

Some of the inexpensive thumb drives are actually still USB 2.0, which is very slow intrinsically. Even some labeled as USB 3 do not seem much faster. Some of these, the very cheap ones, are poorly manufactured, or even misadvertised.

Also, if you are using virus protection, such as Symantec, this can slow down disk operations tremendously, depending on how things are set up.

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Answer 3

Eau Rouge

Level 8

42,656 points

Mar 1, 2021 5:34 PM in response to Lost in Asia

Do not access the files while they are still on the USB stick, drag the files you want to use onto your mac into an appropriately

named folder. Edit these files and save them and when you want drag them onto the USB so you can then share them with

other macs or PC's.

Editing and saving them while they are still on the USB is silly and accounts for the terrible performance.

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Answer 4

Lost in Asia Author

Level 3

778 points

Mar 1, 2021 5:16 AM in response to Owl-53

Thanks - yes, it's already been formatted to exFat. It didn't seem to make a difference.

I don't even really want much storage space; all I'm running on the drive is PortableApps + ODT / PDF / MP3 files to use in class. On the current USB stick, I'm only using about 7GB of space. I've been using this system with my classes for over a decade now, but for some reason in the past year or so the USB sticks are frequently failing on me, and becoming interminably slow. That used to happen every couple of years, and I'd just get a new USB stick, and problem solved for a while; but now it seems to be a permanent issue, including with thumb drives that are brand new - and, as you suggest, formatted to exFat.

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Using a USB thumb drive is painfully slow in Mojave and Windows computers

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