Frustratingly slow transfer speeds to USB stick. How to speed it up?

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Frustratingly slow transfer speeds to USB stick. How to speed it up?

I’ve got to transfer 98Gb of audio and video files to a USB3 memory stick (a brand new Sandisk Ultra Flair 128Gb USB3.0)

The files come from a MacBook Pro mid-2014 with three USB ports. Only one of them is a USB3, the other two are USB2.

Transferring data to a memory stick in one of the USB2 ports is stupidly slow. I’m testing with a 64Gb Kingston Transcend USB3.0 memory stick formatted to ExFat so I can use the stick on Macs and PC’s.

I tried transferring a folder containing just 61Mb of audio files and docs. It took over four minutes.

Transferring the same files via a PC takes seconds. Any idea why the transfer is so slow on this Mac? The Mac has a 256Gb internal SSD with 60Gb free and 16Gb ram, no other programs are running when I try this.

Posted on Jan 16, 2024 3:10 PM

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Answer 1

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HWTech

Community+ 2026

Level 9

70,622 points

Jan 16, 2024 4:01 PM in response to One Brain Cell

The SanDisk Ultra Flair has a maximum read speed of 150MB/s. SanDisk does not even mention the write speed, so it must be slower (probably much slower) than the read speed.

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/usb-flash-drives/sandisk-ultra-flair-usb-3-0?sku=SDCZ73-032G-G46

Even the Data Sheet for that drive does not mention actual write speeds....that should be considered very bad as they are too embarrassed by the write speeds.

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/sandisk/product/usb-flash/ultra-flair-usb-3-0/data-sheet-ultra-flair-usb-3-0.pdf

SanDisk does make some USB sticks with writes speeds of 150MB/s and even 400MB/s IIRC. You must just be very careful to read the product documentation & data sheets to get an actual value for the write speed. 15x faster than USB2 is still slow if USB2 speed as 1MB/s.

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Answer 2

One Brain Cell Author

Level 4

2,167 points

Jan 17, 2024 1:16 PM in response to HWTech

Hi, thanks for your reply. I suspect its the Mac itself that is the bottleneck and not the memory stick (or sticks). I’ve had the MacBook from new and remember having no problems with the USB ports until about the last year or so. I always treat the computer & the memory sticks carefully & I’m the only user.

I have a 1Tb external HDD permanently plugged into the single USB3 port and that still runs as quick as the day I got it back in 2014, so I think its the USB2 port that is at fault, and yet I use the USB2 port for other things (external audio recorder, drawing tablet) and never experience any issue, it only seems to be with memory sticks. I use four memory sticks regularly, they all seem to vary in their transfer speed from week to week (and I’m always transferring the same number of files and the same amount of data from week to week), but the newest memory stick; the USB3.0 speed is by far the slowest.

Back in the OS9 days I could trash the preferences and zap the PRAM if things ever started acting odd, and usually that would fix the issue. Is there any similar sort of housekeeping tricks I can try that would unclog the USB performance and get it back to how it was? I’m running MacOS Big Sur 11.7.9

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Frustratingly slow transfer speeds to USB stick. How to speed it up?

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