maykay5 wrote:
I think its a problem with the MacOS itself, or its a software problem with T7.
PS) Oh, and also, I have encrypted my T7, and am using Samsung's software in both T5 and T7.
I am suspecting that use of non-Apple disk utility software may be a cause or part of the cause of the slow T7. That third party disk software/firmware can often conflict with the built in Mac OS handling of external drives. Drive Manufacturers are often slow to update for compatibility with Sequoia, or if they do they are not fully compatible. Symptoms like what you are seeing often surface when this happens.
The T5 has different firmware from the T7 so it might be expected that things are different with the T5 versus T7.
Not only are you using a third party drive manager software/tool (which I think is not a good idea), but you are using their encryption as well. That adds additional ways to conflict and create problems with MacOS. again, T5 will be different than T7, T7 is much newer. When you use encryption, every byte is encrypted when written to that external drive, any incompatibility can manifest as very slow throughput.
I don't know for sure that this is the root cause, but if at all possible, I would copy everything from the T7 to a safe place, then using Apple's Disk Utility, erase completely the external device at the device level, reformat as APFS/GUID, do not encrypt, and test again. If that does not work, the drive is likely failing.
If you have to use ExFAT, that adds another variable. I avoid using ExFAT but when I have, I have not seen slowness but Etrecheck notes that this could indeed cause slowness in some environments.
Long term, I would uninstall and completely remove all third party Disk Utilities. Even if they work ok in the moment, when there is a future MacOS update or upgrade, they often stop working (or stop working well). But you have to be careful how you go about this to avoid losing access to the drives you have encrypted with the third party softwares. I would first completely back up each drive, then uninstall/remove completely all third party disk tools from your Mac, then using Apple's Disk Utility erase the externals at the device level, format as APFS, or ExFAT if you must, and use Apple's encryption if that is what you want for the externals. Unless you have something that requires it, I would avoid encryption on external drives, it adds yet another way for things to fail. If you need to use it, by all means use it but use Apple's MacOS-provided encryption not a third party tool.
P.S. I use both T5 and T7 drives with Sequoia on a MacBook Pro and both are very fast both reading and writing. With the T5 I see 400-500 MB/s and with the T7 500-900 MB/s (slower when moving lots of small files).
