Level 1

52 points

External Hard Drive incredibly slow after High Sierra

Absolutely fuming isn't the word, ever since Apple stopped making us pay for updates they have been buggy garbage.

Rant over: I'm experiencing a very slow external HDD which is used for files after this update. If I do not have it connected, my iMac works fine. As soon as I connect it and want to browse, it freezes a lot, takes an age to load contents, sometimes even taking 2 minutes. I thought maybe it was because it is indexing, I left it for several hours but it still wont work properly.

Activity Monitor shows high CPU usage with kernal task & iconserviceagent when trying to load these folders, the HDD also makes a lot of noise as if it's under high load.

I've tried upgrading it to APFS which can be done on a HDD, no idea why people say it cannot be done as it has been done with mine! - still no improvement.

Really no idea why I trusted another update, think i'll leave it next time, Sierra brought bugs and High Sierra has totally ruined my computer. My iMac is 21.5 late 2013 with an SSD upgrade. My external HDD is a 3TB Seagate HDD.

Any help, or people with the same issues?

iMac

Posted on Sep 26, 2017 6:08 AM

Top-ranking reply

Pichini13

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Sep 26, 2017 5:03 PM

You can try clearing the icon cache:

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

/Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store

Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select

Services ▹ Reveal in Finder (or just Reveal)

from the contextual menu.* A folder should open with an item selected. Move the selected item to the Trash. You may be prompted for your administrator login password. Restart the computer and empty the Trash.

*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select

Go ▹ Go to Folder...

from the menu bar and paste into the box that opens by pressing command-V. You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.

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164 replies

Zigoto

Level 1

14 points

Oct 31, 2017 9:05 PM in response to J4MMYz

MacOS 10.13.1 installed today seems to have fixed the ext drive video "verifying" issue for me

tbirdvet

Level 6

17,783 points

Nov 13, 2017 4:12 PM in response to tbirdvet

I found if I booted up using command-R and went into disk utilities and clicked on "show all drives"then my "failed" SSD showed up. I then erased and now it works again. Very strange indeed.

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Sep 26, 2017 6:15 AM in response to putnik

So why doesn't Apple make this more clear before it is done? Also, I really don't think that my HDD being APFS is the problem - it was terrible before I did this, and has slightly improved since.

Also, it's not recommended for HDD's? Looks like SSD's also as my computer was lightning fast and now is a dog. It takes forever to start up, my keyboard wont work for a bit either until everything catches up. I really regret this.

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Sep 26, 2017 8:19 AM in response to John Galt

I haven't been just sitting on this site complaining, I have tried things such as First Aid not the HDD, everything was fine. I've tried booting into safe mode and the HDD is still slow. I've been keeping an eye on Time Capsule which has been trying to back up for the past 20 minutes, it's only backed up 50MB of 8GB - it's not backing up the HDD either so it's obviously also running slow.

Total mess, I wont upgrade next year that will sort my problems. Cannot understand why this is just me?

John Galt

Level 10

160,130 points

Sep 26, 2017 8:30 AM in response to J4MMYz

Disk Utility's First Aid function is generally unhelpful, and given Apple's near-abandonment of traditional rotating hard disk drives I'm not expecting that to change.

My iMac is 21.5 late 2013 with an SSD upgrade.

I never asked which model SSD. The only ones I use, can recommend, and confirm work well with High Sierra are those manufactured by OWC / MacSales, specifically their Mercury Extreme Pro models, the oldest of which are now well beyond their five year warranty. Problems with them are literally unheard of. Certain other manufacturers' SSDs are notorious for premature and sudden failure.

I realize the problems disappear after disconnecting the external HDD but bear in mind its contents are being indexed by Spotlight on the startup volume, so the internal SSD could be a contributing factor.

Asking Apple for help with aftermarket SSDs will be a waste of time. They'll hang up on you, figuratively if not literally.

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Sep 26, 2017 11:21 AM in response to John Galt

Yes this is what is happening. I'll give you an example: A folder contains 50 videos, these videos also have custom thumbnails (if you understand? Where you can screenshot a bit in the vid and paste it as an icon) - upon opening the folder, it shows the default thumbnail for a video, without the time info below the name, slowly, one by one the times & custom thumbnails appear... but instead of taking a few seconds it takes minutes for everything to change, this is reset once I restart the HDD/iMac.

Ive just tried deleting the cache, but nothing has changed. I deleted everything inside: /Library/Caches

ANobre

Level 1

4 points

Oct 9, 2017 10:37 AM in response to J4MMYz

I'm also having this $$%ˆ#$*&ˆ! problem with my macbook and seagate backup slim, after Mac High Sierra update.

Just try to access some folder on external HDD after a reboot or power on, BANG! 100% cpu, kernel_task ruin everything...

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Oct 15, 2017 2:55 AM in response to qh05t

They should be releasing a fix, yes. I filed a bug report and has many conversations with a gentleman from Apple, they managed to replicate the issue and are working with iconserviceagent team to get a fix, it should be soon.

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Nov 8, 2017 12:30 PM in response to RyanMv4

There is no fix, unless it's reported to apple. I've reported it and sent a screenshot over of 2 same vids, one without a custom icon and one with, if everyone else could also file a bug report with Apple it will get fixed a lot faster 🙂

tbirdvet

Level 6

17,783 points

Nov 11, 2017 8:25 AM in response to J4MMYz

I just installed High Sierra on an external SSD to test. Worked fine. Then I updated the SSD to APFS and then it took what seemed like forever each time I booted up. Once up it operated fine. Today I went to start up and the SSD had completely failed. Mac no longer even sees the SSD. Apple "repair disc" did not work. Strange but I guess it could just be a coincidence (or not).

Nov 27, 2017 4:58 PM in response to John Galt

I have had the very same problem as others have posted, My external drive is slow with images and downloading or uploading. It's using all of my memory to perform simple functions that were never an issue prior to downloading High Sierra. This is a problem with the High Sierra software update obviously. Why else would myself and others be having the same problems only after downloading this software. If there's a virus it's in High Sierra.

Nov 27, 2017 5:59 PM in response to Pichini13

I DID the exact same thing after taking to the Apple Store, I made them restore everything back to Sierra....has been working like a charm ever since...but luckily I was prepared this time for my client's sake and had everything backed up so I could do with no harm. Hope everyone gets theres worked out...will think twice before upgrading again before I see reviews of problems, etc.

Dec 25, 2017 12:44 PM in response to Paz.americano

Like everyone on this thread I’m experiencing poor external hard drive performance with High Sierra.

I’m also stuck with a hardware issue. Today’s fast SSD use the M2 nvme interface but for some unexplained reason It seams that there is no way to get an M2 to thunderbolt 3 connector.

Anyone in this forum knows why there is no connector available on the market to connect an SSD to a Mac in a performant way?

An M2 SSD has over 30Gbits throughput and thunderbolt 3 is capable on the paper of 40Gbits.

Best connector I can find is using USB-C at 10Gbits/s with is only 30% of the SSD performance.

There is a sonet fusion drive at a very expensive price but it’s never available.

It’s so slow to work on external drive that only way is to copy all files on internal drive, work on it and then copy everything back to the external hard drive.

It’s hours of lost time every single day.

Now that the iMac pro is out, it’s very hard to understand why Apple doesn’t care about this problem.

-Marc__

Level 1

98 points

Oct 23, 2017 10:58 AM in response to DNSBRU

Hi. I just posted a reply to the top-level thread on a method I used to remove all my custom icons. It seems to have solve the problem for me, for now. I hope it helps.

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Sep 26, 2017 6:36 AM in response to John Galt

Well it might be a very big coincidence if my HDD is failing, as it was 100% fine right before I installed High Sierra yesterday. It also slows down my computer whilst it tries loading files, which then freezes my computer even if I don't have the window open on the HDD. As I said, once I turn the HDD off everything is fine.

If I try opening a video, I get a window with "verifying" in it, after about 30 seconds the video finally opens. It happens sometimes, sometimes not. Once it's verified a video, it wont verify that video again until the HDD is restarted.

Copying a file off the HDD to my SSD also is unbelievable, 500MB takes around 30 mins.

I restarted my iMac around 20 mins ago, the HDD is working fine in some areas now they have loaded, but if I try opening folders I haven't opened yet chaos happens again. I can't understand this

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External Hard Drive incredibly slow after High Sierra