Drive contents very slow to show in finder (but very quick on windows machine) - 5TB portable

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

Hi there,

I have the WD drive as registered in my account, with its capacity being 5TB. The drive is approx half full with music files only (approx 2.5TB), but takes approx 9 minutes for the contents of the drive to show in finder within my Mac, but when connecting to my windows 10 laptop, only takes approx 1 minute for content to be displayed.

My drive is formatted as ex-FAT (so that I can use it both on my Mac and windows machines), and I am running Mac OS Catalina.

9 minutes for the contents of the drive to be displayed in finder within my mac seems excessive, and I wonder if there is a setting that can be adjusted to speed this up, or if this in fact indicates an issue with the drive maybe?

I’ve been in contact with Apple Support who have advised everything looks to be set fine on the mac system (the drive is set to exclude from spotlight indexing) and suggested that I contact WD as next step.

Very grateful for any advice.

Thank you,

Simon.

2

Hi,

Please refer to this knowledge base article: Drive Performance Speed and Benchmarking

3

Thank you, but the external HD behaves perfectly fine in Windows 10, just very slow to open on MacOS in finder, therefore I don’t believe there are any issues with the drive, just the extended amount of time that it takes to show contents in MacOS.

Are you able to advise more on this please?

Thank you,

Simon.