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User profile for user: Mel_Rye
Mel_Rye Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

New Mac Studio very slow to access External Hard Drive

Hello there!

Last week I upgraded my 9 year old iMac with a Mac studio. I have never really stored files on the computer's own hard drive, and use an external hard drive for pretty much everything. On my old iMac, accessing the external hard drive was instant, but on the Studio, it's taking sometimes 20 seconds for it to load - I'm wondering if there is something wrong, or if there is something I'm missing here - I thought the Studio would feel so much faster than my old struggling iMac but it's quite the opposite in terms of accessing and opening files. Does anyone have any advice or things to try before I contact Apple support?

Appreciate your help!

Posted on Nov 6, 2023 4:21 AM

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User profile for user: Mel_Rye
Mel_Rye Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Posted on Nov 7, 2023 1:22 AM

Thank you for your reply - this is really very helpful.

I work with quite a lot of video, which is why I need a lot of storage.

Going forward with the Mac Studio, I think I'll likely change my workflow to keeping current projects on the internal hard drive (I have 2TB) and then archive them once finished onto my external drive - it wasn't possible to work this way on my old iMac as there simply wasn't enough internal hard drive space, but I'm in the middle of a video project so don't want to move the files and risk Premiere Pro getting confused with the file paths as I've had issues with that in the past, so I'm hoping the Amphetamine App will at least help me get to the end of this project without running into lots of speed issues.

It's just been quite a surprise to me that the same external hard drive was instant access on a 9 year old computer, but so much slower to access on a brand new higher powered machine.

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User profile for user: Mel_Rye
Mel_Rye Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Nov 7, 2023 1:22 AM in response to tbirdvet

Thank you for your reply - this is really very helpful.

I work with quite a lot of video, which is why I need a lot of storage.

Going forward with the Mac Studio, I think I'll likely change my workflow to keeping current projects on the internal hard drive (I have 2TB) and then archive them once finished onto my external drive - it wasn't possible to work this way on my old iMac as there simply wasn't enough internal hard drive space, but I'm in the middle of a video project so don't want to move the files and risk Premiere Pro getting confused with the file paths as I've had issues with that in the past, so I'm hoping the Amphetamine App will at least help me get to the end of this project without running into lots of speed issues.

It's just been quite a surprise to me that the same external hard drive was instant access on a 9 year old computer, but so much slower to access on a brand new higher powered machine.

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User profile for user: Mel_Rye
Mel_Rye Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Nov 6, 2023 12:10 PM in response to Mel_Rye

It seems my hard drive is being put to sleep after very short periods of inactivity - I tried changing this by going to the Apple menu > System Preferences > Energy Saver or Battery. Then, disabled "Put Hard Disks to sleep when possible" which was automatically toggled on. This didn't make much difference.


I've just installed an App called Amphetamine which has a function to keep selected drives awake - After an initial test it does seem to be making a difference, but will report back on how it performs over the next few days in case it's helpful to anyone else having the same issue.

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User profile for user: tbirdvet
tbirdvet
User level: Level 6
14,351 points

Nov 6, 2023 4:15 PM in response to Mel_Rye

All my external drives are TB NVME drives and all very fast. With the latest Mac Studio it is best to use TB or SSD drives for max speeds although if you really need very large capacities like you have I guess a mechanical drive would be required. My TM drive is mechanical and seems very slow as compared to my SSD drives.

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User profile for user: Grant Bennet-Alder
Grant Bennet-Alder
User level: Level 10
133,171 points

Nov 7, 2023 7:45 AM in response to Mel_Rye

On the Mac Studio Max (not Ultra), the FRONT USB-C ports are limited to nominal 10,000 M bits/sec (about 1000 M Bytes) maximum. That is not a problem for rotating magnetic drives, whose speeds rarely exceed 150 M Bytes/sec.


it can start to be slow the top speeds of SSD drives.


--------

Your reported drive WD Elements 25A3 is a USB 3.0 drive, (the drive itself is limited to 5 G bits/sec) through its USB-A style connector.

The drive specs also report the drive is formatted at the factory as a Windows New Technology File System (NTFS) which is Microsoft proprietary. Without added utilities, the Mac can not write to NTFS drives as issued. If you install WD Utilities, the drive KEEPS NTFS format and creates a Mac Volume-in-a-File (Sparse Bundle Disk Image).


Your perceived slowness could be attributable to this emulation.


We always recommend third-party drives be COMPLETELY Erased, down to the Physical DEVICE, when new, and the maker's Utilities be set aside (unless somehow needed for interchange).


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New Mac Studio very slow to access External Hard Drive

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