Finder slow with lots of volumes mounted?

[haralds]

I have noticed a slow down over several versions of macOS in Finder response with a lot of drives and volumes.
I just added a 10TB USB3 external drive. Throughput with it is good (as expected.) But the Finder has become really sluggish. I have 18 volumes on 11 drives on a Mac Pro. All but the one USB are on eSATA.
I use separate volumes for easier management including Carbon Copy Cloning.
But I often sees spinning balls with the system blocked while drives spin up. Crazy at this day and age.

A few versions ago (post Sierra) I also started seeing enumeration issues when there are a lot of drives at boot. I finally found 6 to be the stable limit, while with earlier versions of macOS and EFI I could do 8-10 without trouble.

Has anybody else seen this? I know this is not a common use case.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Not a real Mac (Hackintosh) but I have just three externals connected via USB. They're all for cloning.

There are definitely times when operations stutter…obviously when I start Disk Utility, Open/Save dialog boxes and so on. It's probably worse than it could be because all of the housings are old USB 2.

I only keep one of them on for a daily clone. The other two when I feel a backup would be a good idea.

The amount of stuttering might be different depending on what type of housing/controller is used.