16” MBP M1 MAX SLOW PERFORMANCE

It’s in the EtreCheck report. The Seagate is

External USB 480 Mbit/s USB

That’s megabits, which is ridiculously slow.

That fine for archiving and storage, but not for production.

Any SSD will be better. Of course that much storage in SSD isn’t cheap. Perhaps you need that much for the project you’re working on.

Tom Wolsky wrote:

It’s in the EtreCheck report. The Seagate is

External USB 480 Mbit/s USB

That’s megabits, which is ridiculously slow.

Yes, but that was due to the drive being connected via the USB2 adapter.

As the OP showed in the last Blackmagic test, the drive is capable of about 100MBps.

hat fine for archiving and storage, but not for production.

Any SSD will be better. Of course that much storage in SSD isn’t cheap. Perhaps you need that much for the project you’re working on.

Agreed, of course.

But maybe the OP does not need all that at once. That would make a smaller SSD, perhaps just 1TB, enough, or perhaps even the internal could be used, leaving the HD for archiving.

“But maybe the OP does not need all that at once. That would make a smaller SSD, perhaps just 1TB, enough, or perhaps even the internal could be used, leaving the HD for archiving.”

Exactly. My message was not clear.

If you’re working multiple projects you might think of using multiple smaller SSDs.

Ideally TB4 drives. OWC has excellent products. The speed is expensive though. TB3 might be the best price to performance ratio at the moment. I use SanDisk 2 TB. Truly pocket sized. Samsung T7 2 TB for most projects. Really like the Samsung X5 1 TB as well.

Compared to a hard drive, any SSD will be a lot faster. I don’t think it is worth going to Thunderbolt 4 SSD. They may give you a speed close to that of the internal drive but cost a lot of money. A USB-C SSD will be less costly and still be more than ten times as fast as your HD.

Spinning SATA drives will top out at roughly 150 MB/s.

SATA SSDs will top out at about 480 MB/s.

NVMe/PCIe SSDs can hit 3500 MB/s.

That would be for single drives in enclosures that aren't a bottleneck themselves. RAID storage will multiply those figures, how much depends on the box, the number of drives, and the interface.

The enclosure matters, and the cable/adapters matter. A lot. Spend some money on a quality TB4 cable. It'll handle all flavors of Thunderbolt and USB, plus video and charging should you need it in the future. Get a quality adapter or hub as well. The cheap ones on Amazon have the right connectors, but will only bring frustration. Not worth the few saved dollars, imo.

EDIT: meant to add formatting...

The drive format also matters. In all cases, you'll want GUID partition map.

For spinning drives, use Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - aka 'HFS+'

For SSDs, use APFS

For drives you absolutely need to share with a Windows machine, ExFAT - avoid this altogether if possible.

Formatting a spinner with APFS will cause problems and should be avoided.

FAT32 should also be avoided, and many drives come pre-formatted this way. Wipe and reformat.

Could you post another EtreCheck report?

I have the 14” version of your computer and have no problem with 4K footage or RED or anything else off the system drive.

What’s sucking up 27G of RAM? None of the active applications are.

You might try updating the OS but I don’t that will change anything.