How come my Samsung T5 is very slow

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Level 1

18 points

How come my Samsung T5 is very slow

I bought a Samsung T5 - 1 Tb, basically to have a FAST disk for photo's and music. My main disk is almost full all the time.

But is is slow, slower than a HDD.

On my Imac 27", mid 2010, when I dragged the folder to it (700 Gb) it, Finder said it would take over a day. I looked into activity monitor, and it reported womething like 10 Mb/sec transfer speed.
So what I did next was connect the drive to my new Macmin, and I expected a big boost even when conecting accross my fixed 1 Gb Ethernet (same Airport Extreme). but the transferspeed is still a low 12-14 Mb/sec.
I used activity monitor to see the transfer rate.

The T5 device is Ubs 3.1 Gen 2 device, thus capable of 10Gb/s and at least 500 Mb/sec should be reached.

What did I do wrong?

I activated the software that is on the disk itself on both machines and installed the madatory drivers.

My IMac is 12 Gb internal, High Sierra

The Macmini is 4 Mb and Sierra.

iMac, macOS High Sierra (10.13.1), SSD

Posted on Dec 13, 2017 2:33 AM

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Answer 1

Rudegar

Level 10

170,850 points

Dec 13, 2017 2:42 AM in response to alberti-nl

if it's not a ssd then the hd inside the external box will never be able to deliver a sustablble transfer rate over around 100MB/sec

so the fact that usb3.1 can transfer faster then the hd can does not really make anything faster

that being said 10MB/sec is pretty slow

if you wish to do real measureing of the transfer speed you should use a program made for that

try

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on the Mac App Store

more

mac measure hd transfer speed

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Answer 2

Dec 13, 2017 2:44 AM in response to alberti-nl

alberti-nl wrote:

...

What did I do wrong?

I activated the software that is on the disk itself on both machines and installed the madatory drivers. ...

just what you stated. No USB mass storage device requires

any special device drivers, whether HDD or SSD.

Manufacturers always think they know better than the operating

system designers how things should work and always foul things

up, whether macOS or Windows (8, 8.1, or 10 at least).

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Answer 3

alberti-nl Author

Level 1

18 points

Dec 13, 2017 3:06 AM in response to alberti-nl

The Samsung T5 is used "out of the box", as the specs say it is compatible with the apple environment. Some sellers say the standard file system is a Windows file system.

Should I reformat the disk to apple file system?

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Answer 4

alberti-nl Author

Level 1

18 points

Dec 13, 2017 3:42 AM in response to Rudegar

Thanks rudegar,

I tried the Backmagic thing, it reports a maximum of read of some 600Mb/sec, for ProRes 422HQ PAL video and cinema DNG is slower at 420 Mb/sec read. Write in general is 1/5th to 1/4 of the read speeds.

So the transfer at least should be higher based on the read speed.

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Answer 5

alberti-nl Author

Level 1

18 points

Dec 13, 2017 11:40 AM in response to alberti-nl

Just to be added: the Blackmagic (video test) thing just shows how consistently fast my Samsung SSD is.

I have now found how to test a specific HD (my second one) where I have the source files. The HD spins at 1500-7000 MB/s read and 500 write in burst mode ; and at other moments it is sluggish at 55 Mb/s with 50-70 write.

So extracting large RAW files (25 Mb) will slow that down maybe; else all kinds of small sidecar files might (the CaptureOne files take up 15% of volume and there are 6 of them for each picture).

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Answer 6

alberti-nl Author

Level 1

18 points

Dec 13, 2017 11:53 AM in response to alberti-nl

In one of the BM tests, where the dashboard reports 2200, the MacOS activity monitor just reports a file activity of some 65-75 MB/s write. Leveled out and averaged I think.

So now I have learned how to select the BM disk, at last, here the T5 results:

PAL/NTSC R 97, write 7500 up to above the dial, and it can go above 10.000 (the maximum of this dial)

2K DCI 3 write, 293 to read and other attemt series up to 8/729

2160 @ 60 Hz 1 write, 132 read. and lower 1/110

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Answer 7

babowa

Level 9

78,109 points

Dec 13, 2017 1:25 PM in response to alberti-nl

alberti-nl wrote:

The Samsung T5 is used "out of the box", as the specs say it is compatible with the apple environment. Some sellers say the standard file system is a Windows file system.

Should I reformat the disk to apple file system?

Well, most hard drives are compatible with either as long as they are formatted properly. If you are only using a Mac, then yes, it is good to have it formatted properly. Not sure about High Sierra, but the first try should be with Disk utility to reformat it; if that does not work (due to the new APFS file system which you may have if you have an internal SSD; if you don't then the regular Mac OS Extended Journaled and GUID partition scheme would be the choice), then go to internet recovery and use its' Disk Utility to format the drive.

Note: That will erase all content, so copy that first. As well, you can safely erase whatever software was included with the drive - there is no need for it. External hard drives do not need any drivers or other software to function.

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Answer 8

alberti-nl Author

Level 1

18 points

Dec 13, 2017 3:28 AM in response to woodmeister50

I did note the SSD was indeed readable by itself;

I assume there are special drivers for enabling TRIM on the SSD and things like that.

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