Does alot of downloading put a strain on the Mac?

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Level 1

22 points

Does alot of downloading put a strain on the Mac?

I’ve been downloading stuff from Internet Archive and putting them on multiple pen drives. I also delete the main copy off my mac. But i wonder if a lot of downloading and transferring files to pen drives alot in a short period would put a strain on the mac. Because sometimes it’s hard to eject the pen drives especially the older ones. the new ones eject just fine. Sometimes i see that multi-colored circle spin around when i try to eject or transfer. I guess im gonna stop downloading and transferring for awhile since that does seem to put a strain on of Mac where it has to work harder…

MacBook Air, macOS 15.4

Posted on Apr 22, 2025 2:16 PM

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Answer 1

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BobHarris

Level 9

58,209 points

Apr 22, 2025 3:06 PM in response to Drickbay

Not really, unless we are talking about thousands of pen drives, and terabytes of data. Which I seriously doubt.

Your older pen drives may just be slow, so it takes awhile for cached writes to be flushed to the pen drives before it can safely be removed.

The file system tends to do any writes to cached memory, and then do lazy writes to the storage. Generally makes for a faster system. If you had left the pen drive in long enough, the lazy writes would have completed, and your eject would have been faster.

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