Win 10 to Sierra

[aibynn]

I apologize for the length of this, I'm trying to be thorough. Also, if this shouldn't be in this thread, my apologies, I couldn't find one that I thought was more appropriate.

I am an IT professional. I work with both Mac's and PC's, but over the last several years my work has been primarily PC based.

I have a 2012 Mac Mini (i7, 16 GB RAM) that I was using for app development years ago, but which now servers as my media center.

Due to some driver incompatibilities with previous hardware, I was running Windows 10 on the mini with no real issues. Until I recently got with with some ransomware and I thought, here's a chance to try Mac OS again.

I fired up the Mini, deleted the Windows partition and upgraded to Mac Sierra. All good.

The issues is that the same hardware that I had running Windows 10 is having a large number of performance issues. Just basic things.

I have an Orico external HDD enclosure. The Mac OS seems to really struggle to write/read to this any performance. I use the Media Center to share with other computers around my house (movies, mostly), and things that worked perfectly, or with expected, insignificant lags, now struggle.

For example, previously, I could open the shared volume on my desktop (windows 10) and start any movie instantly. Transferring files worked as you might expected by two computers that are hard wired.

Since the move to Sierra, double-clicking a file can take anywhere from 5-20 seconds to open. File transfers are much, much slower than I have experienced before. Even once a file is opened, it can suffer from lag at times.

Just on the 1 in a million chance that the hardware magically failed at the same time I moved to Sierra, I tried some other enclosures and HDD with the same result.

It doesn't seem to suffer so much with the internal hard drive, but the USB external is definitely having an issue.

After all that, what I'm looking for is advice on how to approach this problem. It's obviously not the hardware since Windows 10 worked on it perfectly, and I would like to figure out how to fix this issue on the Mac, if only for my own education.

All responses are greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[ferrarr]

What format is the external drive? exFAT, HFS+, other? Since it’s connected to the Mac, it should be Mac OS Extended Journaled (HFS+). It will increase performance, or if possible, format the drive on the Mac as exFAT. I’ve noticed drives formatted on winOS PCs don’t behave the same way as formatted on macOS PCs.

 

[aibynn]

What format is the external drive? exFAT, HFS+, other? Since it’s connected to the Mac, it should be Mac OS Extended Journaled (HFS+). It will increase performance, or if possible, format the drive on the Mac as exFAT. I’ve noticed drives formatted on winOS PCs don’t behave the same way as formatted on macOS PCs.

It's formatted as exFAT, as I want to have the share available to windows machines on the network. Still, I wouldn't expect performance degradation of this level...

 

[ferrarr]

Just as an FYI, with the drive connected to the Mac, and formatted for Mac, it will still be shareable through the networking protocols. So, you don’t have to have it formatted as exFAT, just saying.

However, was the drive formatted on a winOS or macOS PC? Sometimes the issue is the drive being formatted, as exFAT, on winOS PC does not play well with macOS.

 

[MacInWin]

I'd go one further and say to reformat the drive to be Apple friendly and then let the network protocols handle the sharing. That should speed everything up quite nicely. Remember, when you format it, you'll lose everything on it, so copy it all to someplace so you can copy it back after the formatting.

 

[aibynn]

I'd go one further and say to reformat the drive to be Apple friendly and then let the network protocols handle the sharing. That should speed everything up quite nicely. Remember, when you format it, you'll lose everything on it, so copy it all to someplace so you can copy it back after the formatting.

I really appreciate the advice, but are you telling me that Mac OSX is so bad at dealing with exFAT that the performance should suffer that greatly? Why would this be the case?

And the biggest issue with me reformatting it that way is simply that I may want to plug it directly into a windows box again at some point.

I'm happy to try things, but I can't imagine why Mac OSX would struggle so much.

 

[chscag]

It's formatted as exFAT, as I want to have the share available to windows machines on the network. Still, I wouldn't expect performance degradation of this level...

I think that you may not understand what you've been advised to do. There is no need to format the drive to exFAT as the network protocol acts to share the files regardless of format. The question is not that macOS can not handle exFAT, it can. But any FAT formatted drive is non journaled and highly prone to errors - especially across a network. However, it's your network and your choice.

 

[ferrarr]

I meant, to format the drive as exFAT, on the Mac. That was all.

No matter where you format the drive, you may experience these issues on the other OS. It’s part of the way they do their business models.