External Hard Drive incredibly slow after High Sierra

J4MMYz

Thanks for helping get this sorted, I had sent a report to Apple before I found this thread. As I have got the same problem, really annoying that the custom icons dont work and it takes for ever to load them, my ejection of the external HDD is slow too

Does anyone know when the 10.13.2 update is coming out to hopefully reslove this problem?

Thanks

The method described above will erase the icon cache from the OS, not from your files. This will force High Sierra to generate the icons again for every single file you see in Finder, but only once and that might take care of your problem.

I've been working on a High Sierra Virtual Machine using Parallels and transferring the files from one hard drive to the other, seems to also fix the problem, then again, I have clear caches, removed icons and God know what else, so something worked or a combination of all of the above, who know, hahaha.

I will make some more tests and then try to upgrade again and see if it works.

I'm leaning towards an icon database corruption as the culprit as looking thru the forums, people who upgraded to Yosemite, Mavericks, Sierra and now High Sierra, have experienced this behaviour.

Thanks for everybody who posted to indicate the problem was tied to custom icons on large (e.g. video) files. I had dozens of large video files and also folders with custom icons.

Here is the solution I used, after which iconservicesagent is showing only high compressed memory usage and computer is otherwise running smoothly.

First, make sure you have developer utilities installed. To check, open a Terminal window and type: setfile. If the utilities are not installed, macOS will prompt you to install them for you, which is a 2-minute automated process. If setfile spits out its usage syntax, then it is installed and you can proceed.

At this point you can plug in your external drive. As soon as it gets mounted (before iconservicesagent takes all the memory!), in the Terminal window, cd over to the top directory on your drive under which your offending files reside. Then use one of the following, depending on how you want to identify the files from which to remove the custom icon:

$ find . -name *.mkv -print -exec setfile -a c {} \;

(i.e. remove the custom icon from all .mkv files below this point; use a different file name pattern as needed, e.g. *.avi)

$ find . -size +1G -print -exec setfile -a c {} \;

(i.e. remove the custom icon from all files 1 GB or larger below this point; adjust the minimum size as needed, e.g. +100M etc)

As I also had custom icons on many folders, I removed them all with:

$ find . -name Icon$'\r' -delete

The -print option in the above is merely to see which files are found and modified. It can be omitted.

I hope this works for others. I'd be curious to hear back.

I removed all of them from my external drive soon after my High Sierra update because of this problem. However I still have some issues with slowness on the drive (ie copies really slow, apps using it slow, reboots stall until I unplug drive physically, etc). My drive is also encrypted so there may be another problem related to that on High Sierra.

Did you open a bug report? I'd like to monitor and add some info too.

If I had to guess based on the past schedule, it's probably still like a month or so away from public release.

It also does not seem to fix the disk ejection/unmounting problems for me. About 80% of the time, my external HDD just won't eject and I have to log out or force eject it, which is obviously not good. Anyone else having this issue? Just wondering if it's related to the icon issue.

Confirmation:

Computers running High Sierra are solid and fine, UNTIL plugging in a WD external drive... then the computers start running an an unbearably slow speed.

Plug those same drives into Sierra or El Capitan, everything runs as normal.

The health of the external drives and all the hardware are fine. Issue only occurs when an external drive is plugged in via USB.

Has this been solved at all?

I had this exact same issue with my Late 2013 iMac, it was all fine but then I upgraded to High Sierra and it was taking around 40 minutes to transfer a movie file from the desktop to an external hard drive, usually takes seconds..... I had to buy a new iMac because of this, so I now have the 2017 iMac, it came with Sierra which I loved BUT I was having font issues with Sierra and nobody could help, so I had to upgrade, but now i'm getting this slow transfer again on external hard drives!

It's driving me nuts, it says 35 minutes for a 700mb file, so I tried it on another hard drive and the same file took 5 seconds, but now it's running slow on that external hard drive too, saying 30 minutes for a movie file to transfer from desktop to external hard drive!

I'd downgrade back to Sierra but i'd need to get rid of everything on the computer as it's saying it can't downgrade due to there being a newer OS already on it, well duh, thats the whole point of downgrading, so i'd have to delete everything and install a fresh Sierra, but I have Photoshop and FCP amongst many other apps and again, don't have the time to install all of this again....

I'm not sure why it's happening on High Sierra, but it's driving me insane as I transfer files a lot from various drives for clients etc and this is just taking the p*ss.

Same, I spent last night backing up my iMac on Time Machine, and then downgraded back to Sierra, then got my main files back along with applications, just plugged in 2 different external hard drives now and they're back to being fast, where as before it would take literally an hour to load up my thumbnails, now it's just seconds, and transferring files between hard drives is seconds instead of 45 minutes for a 700mb file, High Sierra is a p*ss take, i've realised it's not always a good idea to upgrade!

ONLY issue i've had now with Sierra (reason why I upgraded in the first place on my previous Mac), is that i have font issues on some websites such as Facebook etc, but even on the extensions page on Chrome I can't see names of the extensions, and I get boxes with question marks in..... i'm not sure what's causing it though, I made 2 support threads on here about it but only 1 person replied, rather annoying but i've installed a Chrome extension for fonts which changes the browser fonts and it's worked to a point but still can't see some things, but i'd rather that than the painful transfer speeds.

Yes I'm still having the problem. The difference compared to the previous system version, is that it happens only once (at least for the icon problem) and when the icons are loaded, it doesn't happen anymore. Yet... if you're like me, working 100% of the time , every day, with hundreds of files per day, many softwares, then sometimes the mac slows down and you have to optimise it (cleaning caches, repair permission etc...). I noticed that if you do it... then the problem occurs again. In that case you'll have to wait (for me it's hours) and then until you won't optimise your mac again, the problem remains fixed.

Said that... I'm still having problem in terms of speed when I load files from external HDs (SSD or HHD) using both Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.

I recently upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra straight through to 10.13.3.

I had an external hard drive with folders containing large numbers of large video files, many bearing custom icons. The external drive was on a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) / HFS+ file system.

Though it was suggested that the more recent updates fixed some or all of these problems, I still experienced both:

(1) "Verifying file..." issue upon attempting to open any of these files (reddit link)

(2) Finder freezing with kernel_task consuming heavy resources, when attempting to browse any of these video folders, but not in other folders. Incidentally, the system was otherwise fairly usable with Finder frozen.

I tried the following:

- Reset NVRAM (why I thought this would do anything, don't ask me)

- Booting into safe mode

- Using Disk Utility's 'First Aid' function on the drive.

- Deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

- Adding the external drive to the Privacy section to exclude it from search indexing

- Removed Quarantine attribute from the large video folders using: xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine <folder>

- Disabled Quarantine using: defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO

I think the steps were done in roughly this order, but my memory is blurry.

Currently, both issues are resolved and my custom icons are intact.