External drive partition takes ages to mount
Hi there
On my M1 Mac mini I have a 1TB Seagate M3 Portable USB 3.0 external drive which is connected directly to one of the USB A ports. This drive is divided equally into 2 500GB partitions, one for Time Machine and the other for media (formatted as ExFat so my other non Apple devices can access it) which is where I keep all of my music and video files. Recently after we had a power cut I have noticed that when I turn on my Mac mini the media partition takes an absolute age to mount, I'm not talking a few minutes here it can take anything from 30-40 minutes at best and sometimes it can take over 1-2 hours to mount. What is weird is that the other Time Machine partition on the same physical drive mounts immediately. I tried going into Disk Utility to manually mount the drive which fails. I have also tried running First Aid on the disk before it finally mounts and that fails as well.
Has anyone else had a similar issue? Is this because of the ExFat file format? I don't think that this issue is due to a physical problem with the drive as the other partition works flawlessly.
Like the idiot I am I have not noted down the error messages that Disk Utility gives when I try to either mount or run First Aid on the partition before it finally mounts, the next time I get this issue I will add them to this post.
TIA
John