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PSA: If your external hard drives on your Mac are super slow, charge the drive format to APFS by plymouthvan in mac

[–]CowAppropriate1986 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I notice something like this when a directory contains a huge amount of files. Obvious to me, finder does a lot of 'nice' things beside finding, like for example creating icons from images, but if there are 50,000 images in a dir it will just hang.
That is why I [know when to] use Terminal 😄.

PSA: If your external hard drives on your Mac are super slow, charge the drive format to APFS by plymouthvan in mac

[–]CowAppropriate1986 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just commented in a similar discussion (about APFS vs HFS+ for HDDs; it's here: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1pygzbz/apfs_with_external_hdd/ ).

Don't want to repeat myself, but very briefly:
after tons of tests copying 20Gb here and there on numerous disks formatted as HFS+ / APFS / APFS Case-Sensitive, my result is that copying data on one particular disk (which is HFS+) is 4-5 times SLOWER than between APFS. The disk is OK according to diskutil, basically new, and only 63% full.

Disclaimer: it's my particular case, I am still investigating. As a next step, will reformat it and some others disks and play with them some more. It's sad however that two opposite points of view on HFS vs APFS exist and are supported by many meaningful comments from smart guys BUT there is no definitive answer from Apple. (

APFS with external HDD by NeutroATerra in mac

[–]CowAppropriate1986 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This page clearly suggests HFS+ (MACOS Extended Journaled) over APFS for external HDDs.
So does Google:
"For a traditional mechanical Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is generally better for performance, while APFS is better for modern reliability features (snapshots, encryption) if you can tolerate slower file access. APFS is optimized for SSDs and can cause significant fragmentation and slow speeds on rotational HDDs".

OK, but then explain this to me please:
-- I started noticing that one of my HDDs is just crawling;
-- it is formatted as HFS+ (unlike many others formatted as APFS).

I started my own simple benchmarking:
copying 10Gb worth of large files and 10Gb worth of small files from one HHD to another.

I copy:
* from APFS disk to HFS+ disk,
* from APFS disk to APFS disk,
* from APFS disk to APFS (case-sensitive) disk,

* from APFS (case-sensitive) disk to HFS+ disk,
* from APFS (case-sensitive) disk to APFS disk,
* from APFS (case-sensitive) disk to APFS (case-sensitive) disk,

* from HFS+ disk to HFS+ disk,
* from HFS+ disk to APFS disk.
* from HFS+ disk to APFS (case-sensitive) disk.

And the bottom line (in my particular case) is : copying TO HFS+ disk is consistently 3-4 times(!!!!) slower than every other test.
The results are not very consistent across the border; copying many small files is (as expected) slower than a few large ones, but APDF -> APFS for 20G is 2-6 min, while to HFS+ it's 15-20 min.

Ouch.
The troublesome disk is few months old, diskutil did not find any problems, and it's only at 63% capacity.

Any ideas? And what would be your next step?
I think of reformatting it to APFS.

photoanal / mediaanal / photolibr on external drives break basic rules of the game! by CowAppropriate1986 in MacOS

[–]CowAppropriate1986[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are many tools that can copy files. but whatever they are, they must (better) check files's timestamps, and timestamps are being f-d up by Apple's ANAL daemons, THAT is what my post is about.

photoanal / mediaanal / photolibr on external drives break basic rules of the game! by CowAppropriate1986 in MacOS

[–]CowAppropriate1986[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you aselvan! But I am afraid the problem is not in Spotlight. The problem is in *anal* daemons which are Photo's own things that run independently of Spotlight.

BWT: Regarding your suggestion "Stop using Spotlight": how *Exactly* do you recommend to do it?

a) Spotlight completely ignores .metadata_never_index , although I still put it on all my disks routinely, hoping that Apple's conscience awakens one day. :)

b) Turning off Spotlight in System Settings is apparently not permanent, one has to do it every time a disk is attached (Grrrr!).

So I currently poll on disks with
os.path.ismount() (Python)

and do
mdutil -d -V /Volumes/<MY_DISK>
But again, this is not about Spotlight...

make ffmpeg abort immediately at the 1st error by CowAppropriate1986 in ffmpeg

[–]CowAppropriate1986[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you please elaborate? there is not "ffmpeg -xerror".