Extremely slow external SSD’s and HDD‘s on MacBook Pro 16 M1 Max

[claq]

One of my Macs got very slow when copying a large file (approximately 200GB - a Parallels Desktop VM file) from an external USB 3.0 USB SSD to another external USB 3.0 SSD (on the same Mac) with another Mac using the same Apple ID powered on and nearby. I figured that it was the Universal Clipboard feature, which lets you copy files & text from one Apple device to another using the same Apple ID.
I disabled the Universal Clipboard feature and this did not happen again.
Maybe my experience helps the OP of this thread and anyone encountering performance issues with external USB devices.

 

[Soundizer]

One of my Macs got very slow when copying a large file (approximately 200GB - a Parallels Desktop VM file) from an external USB 3.0 USB SSD to another external USB 3.0 SSD (on the same Mac) with another Mac using the same Apple ID powered on and nearby. I figured that it was the Universal Clipboard feature, which lets you copy files & text from one Apple device to another using the same Apple ID.
I disabled the Universal Clipboard feature and this did not happen again.
Maybe my experience helps the OP of this thread and anyone encountering performance issues with external USB devices.

Thank you.

 

[Soundizer]

Some have said issue with BlackMagic SPEEDTEST not working correctly with Ventura, but I cannot find any post’s anywhere about this. Even checked Black Magic forums

 

[Soundizer]

Anyone had issue with drives formatted as MAC OS JOURNALED (HLS+) slow down aswell?

 

[elliottmart]

I had a problem copying 867GB of photos to my new Crucial X8 SSD from a G-tech HDD under Ventura 13.1 on intel iMac 2019. The finder predicted 20 hours before I stopped the copy after only 200GB copied in 6 hours with the pace slowing. I solved it by installing a trial copy of Carbon Copy Cleaner and trying it again. Carbon Copy Cleaner gave a message that read/write from the HDD was very slow and so I changed the cable from an Apple 6foot USB-C to a short 12" 3rd party cable. The whole process was then completed in about 5 hours with CCC. I plan on purchasing it now to assist with faster copying in the future as well as backup since I like its interface and it did a good job and also suggested a solution to speed up the copy. It's true the shorter cable increased the copy speed using just the Finder as well, but I noticed that even so, CCC did a faster job of copying my apple photos catalog of 350GB. Finder was much slower in the large copy as it progressed, so I switched the copy to CCC which didn't slow down but seemed to keep copying at a steady rate.

 

[dlopan]

I am experiencing this as well. Was moving some files from my 2019 macbook pro on Ventura to my iMac Pro on Monterey. My Samsung t7 gets about 950 MB/s on Monterey and 50 MB/s on Ventura.

I had similar problem on studio, moved off of usb-a to usb-c on the front usb C with a new cable. Now it's happy. 500 MB in 14.5 minutes on a t7.
As screwed up as usb cables and ports are now I would try a different port and cable.

 

[Crispe]

I ran a drive test with Amorphous Disk Mark instead of Blackmagic and the Samsun T7 drive is showing read/write speeds closer to what is expected of it. Blackmagic was like half the speed. Perhaps an issue with Blackmagic?

 

[osplo]

I ran a drive test with Amorphous Disk Mark instead of Blackmagic and the Samsun T7 drive is showing read/write speeds closer to what is expected of it. Blackmagic was like half the speed. Perhaps an issue with Blackmagic?

Interesting. That would explain many things.

 

[gitarzysta]

Someone asked here if this issue only plagues M1 Macs. I have 2020 Intel iMac and usb copy speed are abysmal.
USB pen drives are simply not usable at all.
As far as ssd external drives one day they work ok (confirmed with Black Magic and actual subjective performance feel), to all of a sudden get sluggish.
I could not figure any pattern.

Not much of a helpful post I guess but maybe someone will find it useful.

 

[osplo]

I've been playing a bit with Amorphous Disk Mark and the measurements are almost always higher than BlackMagic. In same cases there is a lot of difference.

I'm still holding to Monterey but I'll upgrade soon I think. FWIW, all my external disks and NAS are slower under Monterey than Mohave. Not much, but go figure.

 

[haddy]

if you do please let me know how it goes, ive still not heard back from apple yet either.

I have 9 external SSDs connected to my Studio ultra mostly Thunderbolt NVMes.
The average read/write speeds are 2500MB/s.
The machine came with macOS 12.6.2.
Now this has become my default position.....I will never upgrade the operating system from the one it was shipped with. Update .. yes, upgrade.. no. And I have used Apple computers since 1987.
Oh, and the read/write speeds for the internal SSD are around 6500MB/s

 

[nvrau]

If you're using OWC Thunderbolt dock and Thunderbolt display, transfer speeds can be significantly increased ~67% if one port on M1 is driving the Thunderbolt display. I read this today on OWC website: https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/74383-faster-drive-performance-with-m1-mac/

Their hypothesis, M1 is designed to only drive 1 external display. It is also designed to give a display priority to port bandwidth. So when one port is driving a display, the full bandwidth is available to the second port. Unfortunately the article is from May '21 and I haven't found an update on the topic since...

I don't have a Thunderbolt display, nor OWC dock, so I cannot test if my ~250MB/s SSD speed will improve. Anyone here able to test this approach and provide feedback?

 

[gitarzysta]

Today I tried to import a video file (2GB) from an external ssd to iMovie. iMovie stalled. The SSD read speeds were crawling. A restart helped. But I am really pi**ed at the whole situation.
It hits you randomly. Usually when you need to do something quickly and you don’t have hours to loose.

 

[nvrau]

If you're using OWC Thunderbolt dock and Thunderbolt display, transfer speeds can be significantly increased ~67% if one port on M1 is driving the Thunderbolt display. I read this today on OWC website: https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/74383-faster-drive-performance-with-m1-mac/

Their hypothesis, M1 is designed to only drive 1 external display. It is also designed to give a display priority to port bandwidth. So when one port is driving a display, the full bandwidth is available to the second port. Unfortunately the article is from May '21 and I haven't found an update on the topic since...

I don't have a Thunderbolt display, nor OWC dock, so I cannot test if my ~250MB/s SSD speed will improve. Anyone here able to test this approach and provide feedback?

I was able to test this with my SanDisk Extreme Portable 1TB SSD (SSD is encrypted) while using a Samsung CJ791 Thunderbolt display on my 2020 MBA M1. I had ~20MB/s increase in SSD transfer speed when monitoring with AmorphouseDiskMark. Regardless of the configuration it measured between ~820MB/s & 840MB/s, or ~2.5%. Far from 67% increase OWC was able to achieve.

I tried:

• both USB-C ports
• with & without the display
• when using the display, connecting it before & after plugging in the SSD
• flipping the USB-C cable to the SSD on the M1 end

Another note, when measuring the speed of the SSD transfer, through the display's 2nd Thunderbolt port, it dropped to ~600MBs.

 

[phloo]

Anyone tested it with the latest Ventura Update?
Some people on another forum said their external drives won't even show up.

 

[osplo]

Anyone tested it with the latest Ventura Update?
Some people on another forum said their external drives won't even show up.

Which means, no need to worry anymore about their slowness. ;-)

 

[donutswindle]

I'm glad I found this forum. I have a SanDisk USB Extreme Pro 256GB which I use for exporting music to DJ, It's lightning fast usually. I've had this USB for years in ExFat format & never had a drama. Since the Ventura update, you can no longer export music onto it in other formats besides Mac OS Journaled. I took the plunge and wiped it clean to this for a new start - Little did I know the write speeds went from 300+ to 30 MB per second. Devastating.

I scouted the internet for hours on this issue, Tried many formats, and even used a Windows/PC to try to format this Ventura error away. After the first PC wipe, The speeds came back on ExFat, I wiped it again to Mac OS Journaled, and Horrible speeds came crawling back and the USB is almost unusable again. I even updated to Ventura 13.2 in the hope they've fixed this issue, But no. Nothing. It seems like this Mac OS Journaled format or Ventura has broken my USB. I'm going to chat with Sandisk and get a replacement and see what caused this issue - I'm very nervous to use Disk Utility on Ventura ever again now...

 

[osplo]

I'm glad I found this forum. I have a SanDisk USB Extreme Pro 256GB which I use for exporting music to DJ, It's lightning fast usually. I've had this USB for years in ExFat format & never had a drama. Since the Ventura update, you can no longer export music onto it in other formats besides Mac OS Journaled. I took the plunge and wiped it clean to this for a new start - Little did I know the write speeds went from 300+ to 30 MB per second. Devastating.

I scouted the internet for hours on this issue, Tried many formats, and even used a Windows/PC to try to format this Ventura error away. After the first PC wipe, The speeds came back on ExFat, I wiped it again to Mac OS Journaled, and Horrible speeds came crawling back and the USB is almost unusable again. I even updated to Ventura 13.2 in the hope they've fixed this issue, But no. Nothing. It seems like this Mac OS Journaled format or Ventura has broken my USB. I'm going to chat with Sandisk and get a replacement and see what caused this issue - I'm very nervous to use Disk Utility on Ventura ever again now...

Have you tried APFS? It's the modern file system, Mac OS Journaled is old...

 

[donutswindle]

Have you tried APFS? It's the modern file system, Mac OS Journaled is old...

Yes, I did, Still has the same slow speeds. Rekordbox by Pioneer a transfer tool for music & DJs requests all USB's now be formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) to sync since the Ventura update. My USB on ExFat was working totally fine before I restored it in Disk Utility to this format.

 

[osplo]

Yes, I did, Still has the same slow speeds. Rekordbox by Pioneer a transfer tool for music & DJs requests all USB's now be formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) to sync since the Ventura update. My USB on ExFat was working totally fine before I restored it in Disk Utility to this format.

Sorry to hear that.

This is so shocking. I'm holding to Monterey because of this, don't think it happens to ALL people but there is a bunch of reports here. I'd report it to Apple like crazy.

 

[osplo]

Any improvements?

I wonder how widespread this bug is. Any 13.2 Macs running external disks at full speed?

 

[likelinus]

Any improvements?

I wonder how widespread this bug is. Any 13.2 Macs running external disks at full speed?

I am. It's a very odd thing too.

2022 MacBook Pro M1 Max w/ 64GB of RAM and 4TB SSD. I have 1.4TB of video storedon my desktop that I temporarily placed there to clear off another drive.

Grabbed one of my Crucial X8 4TB drives and started to move it over. The drive had 3TB free. Well, it said it was going to take 4 hours!! I was like, WTF? I put my 2nd X8 4TB drive in (this one had a little more space) and it did the same thing. Horrendous write speeds.

I have to mention, I was running 13.1 and upgraded to 13.2 in the middle of all of this because I had things stored in other places and just wanted to test to see if it was an OS issue. Same results after upgrading and rebooting.

Finally, I grabbed a Crucial 2TB SSD (internal SSD in an external enclosure) that was empty and was able to move 1TB of data in the time it was taking the external drives to move 180GB! This drive was formatted exFAT. It was 4x the speed of the X8 external. Oddly enough, those externals were working perfectly a week ago, as far as I can tell. I tried a second internal drive (1TB this time) in the same enclosure, but with the new AFPS format and saw no difference than the exFat drive. It was blazing fast compared to the X8 external drives.

I'm now in the middle of backing up the X8 4TB, going to format them, and then see if I have the same results. One thing to note, there were duplicate files from the Mac SSD that were already on the X8s, but they were being copied in a different folder. I didn't want to go through the trouble of figuring out which files were duplicates and I had the space, so I figured just copy them all and be done. I saw a thread where someone mentioned maybe having same files on the drive was causing issues, doesn't sound likely, but I'm putting it out there, just in case.

Something weird is really going on here and I can't quite figure it out. I have (4) 2TB Sandisk T7 and (2) 2TB Sandisk T7 Rugged, but they have R3D footage on them right now and I'll need to move those over to the NAS before I can wipe and test (tomorrow). But it really makes no sense why the external X8 are so much slower than the Crucial internals in external enclosures...

FYI - I have two of these external enclosures and they are great. This is what I used for testing.

ORICO 2.5'' Hard Drive Enclosure Type-C USB 3.1 Gen2 to SATA 6Gbps Computer External HDD Enclosure for 7 9.5mm HDD SSD Support UASP Compatible with MacOS Windows -2139C3-G2

ORICO 2.5'' Hard Drive Enclosure Type-C USB 3.1 Gen2 to SATA 6Gbps Computer External HDD Enclosure for 7 9.5mm HDD SSD Support UASP Compatible with MacOS Windows -2139C3-G2

www.amazon.com

EDIT: Found out something very interesting. So I have the X8 4TB (the original I used that said it would take 4 hrs to transfer 1.4TB) and I'm copying the entire disk to a 2TB Crucial Internal in an external drive. Oddly enough, it's 300GB in and saying it's only going to take 24 minutes! So why is it going to take 4 hours to transfer 1.4TB from the internal storage to the X8 4TB, but only 24 minutes from it to another drive for 1TB??? So it doesn't seem to be the drive, it appears to be an issue with MacOS transferring files to certain SSD? I'm so confused, lol.

Computer 1.4TB > X8 4TB = 4 hours
Computer 900GB (minus files from 1.4 for testing) > Crucial 1TB internal in external case = 40 mins
X8 4TB (only 900GB) > Crucial 1TB internal in external case - 35-40 mins. (on the mac)
Computer 900GB > Crucial 1TB internal in external case = 35mins

I would say it's the external drives, but the perform as they should on the same Mac from itself to another external disk. ugh. FYI - All this is run with all apps closed and System Prefs set to opening nothing.

 

[osplo]

Does 13.3 fix this?

 

[ronin65]

maybe solved! macbook air 2020, intel i7, ventura 13.2 (and now 13.2.1)... sorry for the imperfect English translation... moving from monterey to ventura the copying to ssd disks and usb sticks had become very slow and with a big wait (many many seconds) before it actually started writing... also mounting and unmounting disks took many seconds... now I may have solved it (I hope, at the moment everything seems to be working) by changing some settings:
"settings/general/connection", I disabled all the entries leaving "file sharing", "bluetooth sharing" and especially "content cache" set to "shared content only" (I think it was this change that solved it)... I don't have a technical explanation but I hope it will work for someone else

 

[skateshopusd]

I recently bought a new M1 Max 16" mbp and unfortunately I have the same problem. Even formating the drive and clean instal of Monterey did not work......