Samsung external SSD T7 Touch EXTREMELY slow under Sonoma! (17 MB/sec)!

OoJAMyoO wrote:

Hey,

it was formatted as NTFS

do you have formatted it directly in apfs or HFS lets say an apple format?

for the CleanMyMax discussion ... i will uninstill it right after typing this message! do you have a proposal for a program being bnnot that bad or supposedly that bad to the pc/user? mackeeper? maybe? read somewhere that there are almost equal. anyway.

well, on that (vpn) point i don´t agree! i agree that there were indeed providers which were using the users data and gave hte ip of ppl doing

i must admit though, that for this reason i have to trust my vpn provider. so true. ;)

NTFS -- that might be your problem. NTFS works fine with Macs but you need the CURRENT VERSION of the NTFS driver/extension for it to work properly. You might try updating yours or look for one with better Sonoma compatibility. That said, I think performance with APFS and SSDs is much better. The T7 I use is formatted as APFS and gets more than 500MB/s routinely, sometimes significantly more, closer to 900 MB/s.

CleanMyMac, Mackeeper, and other similar programs are not useful and can do significant harm. There is no need for any of them. This is well documented in Apple Discussions, you can do searches and read hundreds if not thousands of cases posted here. People from the PC world are used to needing such utilities but the MacOS is actually does not mesh well with such software because the things they try to do appear to the OS as a security risk. In that sense they can be considered to be a form of malware and they can degrade the computer's functions, which is in fact what malware does.

VPN -- feel free to use as you wish, but there is considerable documentation online about the scandals and lawsuits involving VPN providers like NordVPN that private individuals use. (Corporate use of VPN for secure corporate networks is different and does justify the use of a properly and professionally configured VPN from a vetted supplier.) NordVPN has had its own security breeches and is being sued for dishonest business practices, such as making it impossible or very hard for customers to cancel their memberships. One would want to see higher, not lower, integrity from VPN providers. Note that VPN providers can and do use your "private" information to build data bases and sell their contents to others willing to pay for the data. Is that what you want? Sometimes this happens in foreign lands and your country's legal system has no authority to stop it. You have zero control over what a VPN provider does with your personal and financial data flowing through their servers.

I noticed several things you may want to look into:

(1) The Samsung T7 has only 5% free space and is set up as a FAT12 drive. FAT12 is the oldest MS-DOS file allocation table scheme used for the oldest MS-DOS floppy disk drives, it is known for its file fragmentation which can slow throughput notably. I would suggest reformatting this drive as APFS to use optimally with a Mac. I have a Samsung T7 and am using it with Sonoma and routinely see > 500 MB/sec.

(2) If you have the Samsung disk utilities software installed and it is using a special driver for that SSD, I would completely uninstall that software when you reformat the drive as APFS. These custom drive utilities frequently stop working well when the MacOS is updated, and they are not needed, and Apple's OS provides all the needed capabilities.

(3) You have CleanMyMac, which has been flagged many times in Apple Discussions as harmful. It installs intrusive extensions into the user setup and the operating system, and has been known to remove files that cause the OS to stop working properly. Whether or not this is related your disk problems, you should completely uninstall it using the vendor's uninstaller. Once installed, we have also seen reports from users that they were having problems uninstalling it completely.

(4) NordVPN is installed. VPNs do not add value unless they are configured by an employer for admission to a secure network. There have been numerous scandals and lawsuits with VPN providers as they can detect and use the users' data for whatever they want. Many of these VPNs are actually better classified as security risks.