External Hard Drive incredibly slow after High Sierra

Hey everyone...

Possibly great news... I think it seems to be fixed in the latest macOS beta (10.13.2 beta 1).

I've just been testing it for about 2 minutes and each folder I've tried so far that has large video files with custom icons seems to be loading very fast. It actually runs a lot better now than regular Sierra.

I'm going to do some more testing to make sure but for right now it seems to be working well and I am very happy.

Problem solved!

Version 10.13.2

How do you know that external hard disk drive is working as it should? The symptoms you describe are consistent with disk failure.

I haven't experienced what you're describing, even with APSF formatted external hard disks.

When traditional rotating hard disks fail, they usually fail after a lot of activity.

Replace it with one known to be operationally intact, and you will have your answer.

Needless to say, if you are using any non-Apple "anti-virus" junk, various and sundry "cleaning" garbage, non-Apple disk drive "managers", "optimizers" or similarly categorized "utilities", don't. Those things are certain to cause performance degradation, premature failure, or both.

J4MMYz wrote:

I don't think so, iconserviceagent seems to flare up when trying to load the folders contents, once they are loaded it's fine and the computer runs perfectly.

I noticed the same thing if I were to intentionally rebuild the icon services database, which causes every icon to be rebuilt with each newly opened Finder window. It only happens once, after which the FInder's performance returns to normal.

This is your problem: "I do not have a backup so if something goes wrong im done for"

From what I understand, you have updated to High Sierra. You are experiencing significant problems. Your Time Capsule backup has gone off the deep end. You have critical files stored on an external hard drive and you have converted that hard drive to an unsupported and version 1.0 APFS format. Whether this is a hard drive problem or a software problem is irrelevant. It is the security and existence of your data that you should worry about.

We know very little about your external hard drive. We also know very little about High Sierra since it was just released. Is there some incompatibility between High Sierra and the firmware on your external drive? I don't know.

Converting the drive to APFS is going to radically re-arrange the content on the disk. Perhaps you weren't reading from bad sectors before and maybe you are now. Just because a drive isn't making unusual noises doesn't mean it isn't failing.

A good test would be to see if another external hard drive exhibits the same problems. If not, then the drive is probably bad. Does that mean it is a software problem with High Sierra? Maybe. But isn't your data going to be scrambled just the same no matter what the cause is? Do you know how long it takes Apple to fix bugs like this? If you are really lucky and have a few hundred thousand people hit with the same bug, maybe it will be fixed in six months. What are you going to do until then?

Hi,

I have this exact same problem. It first happened when I plugged in an external hard drive after upgrading from Sierra to High Sierra. iconservicesagent basically went crazy and used an astonishing 36GB (yes, GB) of physical RAM on my computer, before running out and continuing to use SSD space to keep using RAM until I ran out of space. I first though it was a problem with permissions, ACL and such, so I tried repairing those, no dice.

Went and did a clean install of High Sierra and the exact same problem happened as soon as I plugged in the external hard drive.

I also have custom icons for my files on that hard drive (by copying and pasting a photo to the icon on the "get info" panel) and that is what is driving the CPU and RAM usage thru the roof.

I have a maxed out late-2015 iMac 5K and the whole thing comes down to a crawl. Finder completely stops responding until I reset the computer or disconnect the external hard drive.

Any ideas as how to fix this?

Well, it's clearly a software problem. I did a clean install and the problem immediately presented as soon as I plugged in a newly formatted external hard drive, with a couple of files with custom icons, so clearly this a High Sierra only, software related problem.

Anti-Virus and failing hard drives have nothing to do with this clearly nasty bug that is not present on Sierra and prior OS's. I did a clean install and used a new hard drive formatted first with HFS+ and the APFS.

My i7-6700K was showing 100% usage for more than 30 minutes and RAM usage went as high as 60GB, until the SSD ran out of space and the process was killed, only to be initiated immediately again and iconservicesagent proceded to to the exact same thing, again and again and again.

I ended up going back to Sierra, I did a backup just before upgrading to HS. What I'm working on right now is filing a bug report with Apple (you should do the same) and removing the custom icons from those files and see if that does the trick. If this works, then we just have to wait for a fix and then promptly add the custom icons back to the files.

As for the "verifying", it did not happened to me, but the boards are littered with people complaining about that.

In my case, that's pretty much it.

I have tried it with 3 different external hard drives with three completely different sets of data and the result is the same. In a clean install of High Sierra, with absolutely nothing installed or configured, just plug in the hard drive with the files with custom icons, open it in Finder and you get your bug. It's astonishing easy to reproduce.

Pichini13 wrote:

In my case, that's pretty much it.

I have tried it with 3 different external hard drives with three completely different sets of data and the result is the same. In a clean install of High Sierra, with absolutely nothing installed or configured, just plug in the hard drive with the files with custom icons, open it in Finder and you get your bug. It's astonishing easy to reproduce.

There has got to be something more to it. I'm running fine here:

Just wanted to add that I'm having the exact same issues as J4MMYz and wanted to thank him for helping to get Apple to work on a fix (that will hopefully be applied soon).

Same issue with custom icons on large video files on an external HDD. Each icon of each video takes like 10-60 seconds to load depending on the video file size, and the external hard drive is basically unusable until the entire folder loads, which sometimes can take over 15 minutes.

The issue occurs on both external hard drives that I've tried, so it's obviously a High Sierra issue.

I'm on the latest 10.13.1 beta and it hasn't been fixed yet, unfortunately.