Last week I started backing up some data to an external USB hard drive that I have (2.5", 5400 RPM, Western Digital, USB 2).
I formatted the drive as APFS, encrypted.
I'm backing up a folder with ~150 GB, in the form of ~100,000 files of varying sizes.
The first time I did this backup (really just a copy), it took about 40 minutes, which means an average of ~60 megabytes per second write speed, which is about what one would expect for writing many files (including small files) to a 2.5", 5400 RPM drive.
Now I'm doing the same thing a week later, nothing has changed, but instead of taking 40 minutes, it's on target to take about 8 hours (it's about half done).
Looking at Activity Monitor, the hard drive is writing at a rock-solid rate of 5-6 MB/s.
Anybody have any idea what might be going wrong here? That's many times slower than it should be, obviously, and the fact that it's at a constant rate suggests to me that it's being artificially capped by something but I have no idea what that something might be.
Ideas? Thanks in advance.
I formatted the drive as APFS, encrypted.
I'm backing up a folder with ~150 GB, in the form of ~100,000 files of varying sizes.
The first time I did this backup (really just a copy), it took about 40 minutes, which means an average of ~60 megabytes per second write speed, which is about what one would expect for writing many files (including small files) to a 2.5", 5400 RPM drive.
Now I'm doing the same thing a week later, nothing has changed, but instead of taking 40 minutes, it's on target to take about 8 hours (it's about half done).
Looking at Activity Monitor, the hard drive is writing at a rock-solid rate of 5-6 MB/s.
Anybody have any idea what might be going wrong here? That's many times slower than it should be, obviously, and the fact that it's at a constant rate suggests to me that it's being artificially capped by something but I have no idea what that something might be.
Ideas? Thanks in advance.
