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

etresoft

Level 9

58,798 points

Sep 26, 2017 4:36 PM in response to J4MMYz

J4MMYz wrote:

How do I file a bug report with Apple? I'm definitely going to do it as I cannot stand for this.

Go to http://bugreport.apple.com to file a bug report. You may need to create a free developer account.

High Sierra is a brand new operating system and is bound to have lots of problems. Backups are essential.

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Sep 26, 2017 5:01 PM in response to Pichini13

Sorry I was supposed to answer that. I'd love to but I think i've got over 5,000 custom icons there is no way I'm doing that lol. Thank you for the link to bug reporting I shall do that. I'm getting a new HDD to replace my Time Capsule as it's too small, i'm planning on moving the contents off my current 3TB HDD to this new 4TB, which is 500rpm's faster also, I'm wondering if it's going to change anything or if it's going to act the same, if it works normally on this new HDD it'd point to something not working correctly with existing files on external HDD's but I think you mentioned you pretty much tried something like this already and it made no difference?

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Sep 26, 2017 5:14 PM in response to Pichini13

Is there a way I can do this without permanently losing these custom icons? As you can appreciate it will take hours to remake them after either the fix or knowing it wasn't the issue. Can I simply move it out on to the desktop, so I can move it back if it doesn't fix anything?

Also: I copied a folder which has a custom icon with 5 videos in, also with custom icons to my SSD, as I mentioned before it takes a very long time to load the contents of the folder which intern slows the computer down and flags that iconserviceagent to use CPU.

Well, since it had loaded everything in that folder so everything was up to speed again, I copied the folder from the HDD to my SSD, it moved 5GB in a normal time, INSTANTLY loaded the folder icon, and upon clicking into the folder instantly displayed the videos and played them straight away.

EDIT: Just copied the folder back to the HDD from the SSD, in a new location. It's now completely slow again.

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Sep 27, 2017 5:10 PM in response to etresoft

Yeah very strange. My CPU goes to around 50% usage for iconserviceagent - I sent the screens off to Apple with the bug report.

Maybe this is just a luck thing, I agree there must be more to it. Strange how some people can be fine and others have major issues. Then again, my iPhone 6 upgraded to iOS 11 with no hassle/issues... my dads iPhone 6's sound wasn't working after the update, I had to restart it using the home button/lock button together to force restart, then it worked... really strange how it's all the same devices but some get problems and some don't.

Pichini13 - Do you have a lot of files on your HDD also to replicate this issue? Since Etresoft doesn't obviously have a lot of files in his test.

Etresoft, try getting some videos around 500MB, around 5 or so and try the test again. My HDD seems to load pictures and smaller videos almost normally compared to loading higher data.

edit: ok Pichini13 replied as I typed this nvm

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Sep 27, 2017 5:14 PM in response to Pichini13

Okay this is strange. I read what you said about not letting you custom icon those files again. I have a video without a custom icon, so I screen shotted the video, pasted it as normal and the icon instead of being rectangular, is square and has made the icon look very weird also. It's definitely custom icons causing this issue. Shall we update the bug report we sent? I'm not even sure if Apple will reply to it, would be nice so I could at least shine some light on this. Either way the link to this discussion was provided to them also so hopefully they read this.

DNSBRU

Level 1

4 points

Sep 27, 2017 11:10 PM in response to J4MMYz

In my case it’s pretty much the same scenario. Large video files (some around 4 GB, others around 20 GB) with custom icons. My External HDD is unusable, same as yours J4MMYz. This needs to get fixed.

DNSBRU

Level 1

4 points

Sep 28, 2017 4:39 AM in response to J4MMYz

Not yet, good idea. Where do I file the bug report?

I tried removing my custom icons but when I tried it on a larger file my Mac just stopped responding and honestly I don’t have the patience to wait 10 minutes for a stupid icon to load just so that I can remove it.

I hope it won’t take them a year to fix this that’s just unacceptable.

All my movies and TV shows on my external hard drive are pretty much unwatchable right now.

Zigoto

Level 1

14 points

Sep 28, 2017 7:39 AM in response to J4MMYz

I have the same question and have been looking for an answer to this since I upgraded to High Sierra on Tuesday. I have one USB drive connected directly to the iMac (2013) and another one as a network USB drive behind my router. Prior to the High Sierra upgrade, files on these drives were accessible nearly instantly. Now, for the most part, it takes over 60 seconds of "verifying" before the file opens. The identical files on the iMac hard drive open immediately as before. I am not hearing any unusual drive noise from either of these external drives.

I am completely certain this is not a coincidence.

Prior to this High Sierra update Tuesday, I have never before seen this popup that a file I'm trying to open is "verifying".

nsabbath

Level 1

4 points

Oct 9, 2017 12:59 AM in response to J4MMYz

You are not alone on this, I am having the exact same problem with my Toshiba HD. It also happened before when I updated my Mac to Sierra so I just waited and after few months it started working again. It is happening now with my High Sierra update. So I would suggest just wait a while it might be some bug and Apple might fix it hopefully (finger crossed). Meanwhile if you come across any solution please do update.

BradPDX

Level 1

128 points

Oct 9, 2017 1:54 PM in response to J4MMYz

Odd. I'll be curious to see what it's all about, I am aware of no one else that has the issue outside of this discussion thread. Likely something a tad esoteric that doesn't appear in test matricies.

I never, ever use custom icons, so that might be factor. Dunno. We'll see.

J4MMYz Author

Level 1

52 points

Oct 10, 2017 4:17 AM in response to urabus

You've made a very good point about maybe an issue between APFS and Mac OS Extended. I did try however converting a HDD to APFS and it was still the same, but still you may have a point.

Please I cannot stress enough if you have this issue please open a bug report with Apple.

Oct 14, 2017 4:54 AM in response to J4MMYz

After the upgrade to High Sierra, whenever I access files on external hard drive, MacBook almost freezes for few minutes. This had happened before I moved the external drive to APFS, and I thought moving it will solve the problem, but it didn't.

When my external HDD is not connected, MacBook runs with no problems

DNSBRU

Level 1

4 points

Oct 23, 2017 11:34 AM in response to -Marc__

Hi.

I want to try it. But I have one question: What to you mean by "...in the Terminal window, cd over to the top directory on your drive under which your offending files reside"?

EDIT: How do I make this command "find . -name *.mkv -print -exec setfile -a c {} \;" work for my external HDD. Right now it searched for files in my downloads folder.

-Marc__

Level 1

98 points

Oct 23, 2017 11:57 AM in response to DNSBRU

That find command, as written, starts from the current directory. The cd command changes the current directory. My original suggestion was to use cd to change the current directory so that it is your HDD drive. That would be under /Volumes.

Another way is to type cd in your Terminal window, then drag from a Finder window the directory you want to start from on your HDD to the Terminal window (that dragging action will insert the name of the directory in the command line) and then hit Enter. This is illustrated in this video.

nsabbath

Level 1

4 points

Oct 23, 2017 12:02 PM in response to -Marc__

Thank you I will try it, just to make it clear this command

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

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

it will delete the icons not the folders right ?

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External Hard Drive incredibly slow after High Sierra