USB-C External SSD works fine for a while but periodically slows to a crawl

@emde-ash Do you consider Seagate to be untrustworthy? Or are you saying I may have gotten a counterfeit? I was able to register my SSD with Seagate using the serial number on the box, so I'm pretty sure it's not a a counterfeit.

I do find it odd that Seagate offers more software for Windows than they do for OSX. Maybe there's something they provide for Windows that's needed to keep the SSD working properly.

@emde-ash Thanks for the info! My SSD is always connected to the same USB-c port, and it is always mounted. I've never had an issue when it wasn't mounted. Even when it is very slow, I can see that it's still mounted and I can access it from Finder. Given that, would the changes you propose to fstab fix my issue (periodically slow SSD)?

@Tom Gewecke yeah, I probably should do that. It would be a lot of work to switch browsers. I have posted this issue on the Brave forum and no one else seems to have the exact problem. Some have posted issues of Brave being slow at times, but no one else mentions issues with it causing their SSD to freeze up periodically.

Thanks. Here's the info. This SSD is connected directly to a USB-C port with the cable provided by Seagate. The fstab file didn't previously exist. I created one with a single row containing:

UUID=4a5f…  /Volumes/FastSSD  apfs  rw,auto  0  0

  Free:	445.74 GB (445,741,531,136 bytes)
 Capacity:	499.9 GB (499,898,105,856 bytes)
 Mount Point:	/Volumes/FastSSD
 File System:	Case-sensitive APFS
 Writable:	Yes
 Ignore Ownership:	Yes
 BSD Name:	disk3s1
 Volume UUID:	4A5F...
 Physical Drive:
 Device Name:	Fast SSD
 Media Name:	AppleAPFSMedia
 Medium Type:	SSD
 Protocol:	USB
 Internal:	No
 Partition Map Type:	Unknown

PS- I added an image of this info in my original post but for some reason it's just showing an empty box.

@emde-ash Thanks for the info. Is the swap info just general info about improving performance or is it directed at my specific issue with my external SSD? I don't see how it is related to my issue, so I'm assuming the former.

But apps that are not using the external SSD work perfectly. They would also be slow if the swap was the issue. Right?

Yeah, I probably need a NVMe drive with a thunderbolt connection. Most of the time my external SSD is fine. It works fine for a week and then something happens and it becomes very slow (or unusable) for a while.

I also don't reboot often. I generally just put my mac to sleep. Rebooting seems to fix the external SSD issue. Thought sometimes it causes the reboot to take a very long time.

Are NVMe drives better because they support Trim?

My SSD works well most of the time. The speed is good enough. My only issue is that after about a week it becomes very slow. I suspect it's a Trim issue, but can't get a clear answer on that.

Thanks, emde-ash. I'll give it a try.

One thing I noticed recently is that most of the time the only issue with the external SSD is I can't write to temporarily becomes extremely sluggish (i.e. copying a 1k file will take 30 seconds). Reading from it seems to continue to work and there never seems to be an issue with mounting it.

Or put another way, is there any maintenance that's needed for external SSDs something like Trim?

I have 16GB and I've never seen memory usage get above 14GB, but I do see swapping be used.

@emde-ash Updating the fstab didn't work. When I booted with the change, it didn't mount the drive and it wouldn't let me mount it until I deleted the fstab file.