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All My External Drives do not play well with High Sierra APFS

PicnicTutorials

PicnicTutorials

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 29, 2013
546
13
All my mp4 files give a validating alert and take minutes to open. All my Plex media meta data is broken (Plex can’t read it anymore). Transferring files from my iMac late 2013 to the external drives takes literally 20 minutes per GB. If it transfers at all. Unmounting the drive and/or powering it on/off is the only temp fix for a few minutes. My files on the computer all work fine although slower. It’s clear to me that APFS does not play well with formatted journaled external hard drives. I will wait patiently for a bug fix to come from apple. Although when calling Apple Tech Support they are all clueless to any of these issues and clueless to fix. Reading hundreds of web threads I can verify these are not isolated issues I’m having. If bug fix doesn’t come sometime soon I will have to painstakingly go back to Sierra 10.12. As of now working on my computer is almost to frustrating to bear.
 
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I've had problems too with my external. I'm using a new 2017 iMac with SSD now on APFS, and always have an external drive connected - standard format (MacOS extended journaled). Since updating to High Sierra it has randomly been switching the external to 'read only' mode. Once or twice a day. I only realize it once I try to write a file and can't. I have to unmount and remount the drive from Disk Utility to regain write access. It's extremely frustrating. Not sure how an issue like this made it to public release.
 
my externals (3 seagate drives, a crucial ssd, and numerous flashdrives) are all rocking & rolling. so something's up with your setup, this is not a global issue. also, my plex files are on an SD card (in my macbook pro), and all play fine...
 
I just copied my SSD Sierra boot drive over to a spare ext spin drive.
Booted from it. Turned off time machine and unplugged my SSD for luck.
Installed HS on the ext drive. It took about an hour.
My internal spinners were immediately recognized, as was my SSD, when I plugged it back in.
iTunes (12.7 and 10.4.1) recognized and played from their libs on the internal spinner.
Agree with fisherking. You've got something funny going on.
 
After doing the update today, I'm also having an issue where Time Machine backup fails and says the next backup will be "When disk is connected" - yet, the disk IS already mounted, and I can see it just fine in Finder and Disk Utility.
 
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My External drives are MacSales 5TB OWC Mercury Elite Pros. All fairly new. So good drives. 1GB takes 20 minutes to transfer to the drives in High Sierra. Whereas in Sierra 1GB took 5 seconds. I’ve unmounted and restarted the drives. Doesn’t help. I’ve first aided them and it said they were fine. But I knew that already. Open to suggestions.
 
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PicnicTutorials said:
My External drives are MacSales 5TB OWC Mercury Elite Pros. All fairly new. So good drives. 1GB takes 20 minutes to transfer to the drives in High Sierra. Whereas in Sierra 1GB took 5 seconds. I’ve unmounted and restarted the drives. Doesn’t help. I’ve first aided them and it said they were fine. But I knew that already. Open to suggestions.
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you might want to contact them, or search this forum; wasn't there a report that their drives had an issue with 10.13? anyone?
 
fisherking said:
you might want to contact them, or search this forum; wasn't there a report that their drives had an issue with 10.13? anyone?
Click to expand...

Thanks. Well I contacted them and their suggestion was to convert the drives to APFS. Which I did and still takes 20 minutes to transfer 1GB. Every time I unmount/remount the drive it works for one file transfer and then the 2nd is back at snails pace. Sad
 
PicnicTutorials said:
Thanks. Well I contacted them and their suggestion was to convert the drives to APFS. Which I did and still takes 20 minutes to transfer 1GB. Every time I unmount/remount the drive it works for one file transfer and then the 2nd is back at snails pace. Sad
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can you reformat one to HFS+? and see how that goes? also, there's been some discussion (check this forum, or google it) specifically about OWC drives & APFS. my externals are still HFS+, and am not having any issues (both my macs have the new file system).
 
fisherking said:
can you reformat one to HFS+? and see how that goes? also, there's been some discussion (check this forum, or google it) specifically about OWC drives & APFS. my externals are still HFS+, and am not having any issues (both my macs have the new file system).
Click to expand...

3 of them still are HFS still. The only stuff I could find was SSD owc and High Sierra. Mine are spinning drives
 
can you run disk first aid on them? try a 'virgin' drive (maybe a cheap flash drive?) just to see how that does. problem seems specific to your setup. these are usb drives? you could also try resetting the smc, and the pram...
 
I have external drive issues with High Sierra too, very similar to yours.

I’m using a 4tb seagate, which I use for Plex. I’m seeing very slow transfer speeds, the same ‘verifying’ notification when trying to play any movie file, slow system response, and all sorts of weirdness... when transferring files to the drive, for some reason it eats up my system drive’s memory! I’ve watched it tick from 60gb free, down to 23gb, what the hell?!

I ran first aid on all disks, apparently fine. This is a regular HFS+ external on a MacBook Air 11”. Been using it for 2 years without issue until the high Sierra update. I’ve submitted this to Apple, for what it’s worth, but it’s very irritating.
 
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borelli said:
I have external drive issues with High Sierra too, very similar to yours.

I’m using a 4tb seagate, which I use for Plex. I’m seeing very slow transfer speeds, the same ‘verifying’ notification when trying to play any movie file, slow system response, and all sorts of weirdness... when transferring files to the drive, for some reason it eats up my system drive’s memory! I’ve watched it tick from 60gb free, down to 23gb, what the hell?!

I ran first aid on all disks, apparently fine. This is a regular HFS+ external on a MacBook Air 11”. Been using it for 2 years without issue until the high Sierra update. I’ve submitted this to Apple, for what it’s worth, but it’s very irritating.
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I think it may be a finder issue. Using a finder replacement seems to fix the slow transfer rate. It’s s hit and miss bug so I haven’t seen it yet using replacement finder. Although I also haven’t found a finder replacemnt that I can live with yet.
 
We shouldn't have to find Finder replacements! Interesting discovery though, thanks. Hope it's fixed quickly, it's a pretty fundamental bug.
 
borelli said:
We shouldn't have to find Finder replacements! Interesting discovery though, thanks. Hope it's fixed quickly, it's a pretty fundamental bug.
Click to expand...

*Bump*

Anybody have any updates on this yet? I just recently updated to HS and am getting the exact same slow transfer speeds. It's quite irritating. One is a 4TB WD USB 3.0 powered drive, the other a SanDisk UltraFit 64GB drive (I know those don't have the fastest transfer rates to begin with, but this is astronomically slower than before). Much like another user mentioned, I'm also getting massive system slowdown and memory usage just on these basic file transfers.

Hoping for a fix soon without looking for a Finder alternative!
 
Just signed up to reply with info that might be helpful. Found this when searching for info on whether High Sierra can support external HFS+ even if internal drive is APFS. (Don't have answer I'm confident in yet.) I've used macs since July '92, but still consider myself a newbie and just end user. Having to upgrade the OS on both home and office machines I use or am responsible for (Yosemite, El Cap) and waited too long to jump to Sierra directly (it was pulled as upgrade option... I'm slow). Given this is from a vendor site, take with salt as they specialize in upgrade drives and hardware. I do buy from them, but it concerns me from the thread above that not everyone in their tech support is aware of this dialogue from their own blog. This has a link in the article to a speech by a guy who knows his drives from the perspective of his own product (SoftRAID... now owned by OWC). After watching his talk I decided it was worth the search and cost to buy a USB install drive (from eBay) for Sierra. Seems to have worked on my home machine so am starting on my office machines after dual backups. Link to blog post is https://blog.macsales.com/42819-video-presentation-taking-a-deep-dive-into-apples-apfs but the bottom line is stay away from APFS if you have spinning drives. It seems to be still a work in progress that is more optimal for SSDs.
 
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