very slow using Photos on external hard drive

Question

very slow using Photos on external hard drive

I've been using an external hard drive (2T, Mac OS Extended) for some time (about 40,000 images = 223 Gb). This was a solution to running out of storage space on my old Macbook Air. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like the idea of having my images in the Cloud. In any case, I now have a newer Air (M2 chip, 8 GB memory) and it appears there is enough space to store all of my images with about 100 Gb to spare, so I was planning to transfer them. It's always been slow to search and manage metadata using the external drive (even worse now, having to go through a hub, I think). Every time I make an effort to make changes and toss old photos (to lessen the load, as it were), it just takes so long that I give up before ever making a dent. I assume Photos will run significantly faster and more efficiently on the resident hard drive. Is this true, or are there other options available? THANKS.

MacBook Air, macOS 15.3

Posted on Mar 2, 2025 2:35 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 2, 2025 11:07 PM in response to botany-justice

As markwmsn said the old HDD is slow (even with MacOS Extended which is the preferred format for HDD).

Get a good external SATA SSD in a good USB enclosure formatted as APFS (and remember to backup also it) so you get about 5x more speed or maybe even more if you get a newer interface than SATA. Yes, SSD is more expensive than HDD. I use old HDDs only as "cold" archives.

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Answer 2

Mar 3, 2025 8:45 AM in response to botany-justice

Apparently everybody has thoughts about external drives! My "contribution" is that the older drive is using probably USB 2 with a USB-A connector, and your MacAir uses USB-c connectors with USB 3&4 that can be much faster. You can get a new, tiny 4 TB SSD, for about $130 or so that will work at maybe 1 GB/s.

100 GB extra room will disappear amazingly quickly!

Many of us keep an archive Library, and we copy our favorite pictures to a smaller Favorites Library that will fit on the internal drive, and which we don't expect to grow so fast.

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