Thunderbay 4 Finder Access Slow Even After DiskWarrior Rebuild and Reformat

HFS requires about 15% free space, because there are so few allocation blocks, so yes, the fullnewss of the volume could be a factor.

Normally, Disk Warrior, at least temporarily on full volumes, fixes this however.

Since the drives are spinning, it is not the drives.

Can you temporarily delete 500GB of older files?
another possible issue is fragmentation, depending on what you have been doing with the volume. There are no ore defragmentation apps I think, not sure. Maybe Micromat still has it built into TTP, though. Heavy fragmentation on a full volume could have an impact.

Yes, I'll try deleting at least 500 GB or more of older files the first chance I get then I'll rebuild the directory using DiskWarrior.

I've read in the forums that SoftRAID has suggested backing up files, setting up a new volume, and then copying the data back to the new volume which I did a few days ago. Isn't that supposed fix the fragmentation?

@midihead7 

Yes, that would fix any/all fragmentation.

And, even with a relatively fill volume, it should not take forever opening folders after doing so

Has the volume finished indexing? (when you are not using the volume, there are not disk activity lights)

Not sure what else could be causing this.

When not using the volume, I don't see any disk activity lights except for every 10 seconds when Amphetamine is keeping the drives awake. I'm using that because I thought that the drives were spinning down but that doesn't seem to be the problem.

@midihead7 

Amphetamine won't sloe things down, either. You can look at activity Monitor, see if there is excessive memory pressure, or apps using a lot of memory.

I did check Activity Monitor. Memory pressure looks normal (low) and there aren't any apps using excessive smounts of memory. The issue only happens on my Thunderbay 4 (Thunderbolt 2 version connected to M1 Mac Studio Max using Thunderbolt to USB-C adapter) but not on any other external drives.

@midihead7

Did you try the trick of deleting the spotlight index and seeing if that was it?

Yes, I deleted the Spotlight index but this made no difference. I did notice that if I boot into Safe Mode on my M1 Mac Studio Max, the issue "appears" to go away when accessing my Thunderbay 4 using the Open/Save dialogue box. I think that this would indicate something running under normal boot that is interfering with the Open/Save dialogue. I have removed things from opening at login and also uninstalled the Google Drive app, the Synology Drive app (neither of which were set to sync files on my Thunderbay 4), and turned off iCloud Drive sync (which wasn't syncing the Thunderbay) but the issue remains under normal boot. It seems like accessing the files through "Open/Save" in the Finder is quicker soon after boot but it seems to get much slower the longer the Mac is on.

@midihead7 

Good tries. Indexing is the most likely culprit.
Any anti malware type apps running?

Regarding indexing, when I exclude drives from indexing, they are removed after reboots so indexing is re-enabled. I haven't found a way to keep them permanently excluded.

I am running Bitdefender but I've already tested with all modules disabled with no improvement.

I am currently testing while being signed out of my Apple ID on this Mac. There "seems" to be much less lag, although it hasn't been too long since I rebooted after signing out.

@midihead7 
If you exempt a volume using System Settings/Spotlight, it should not start creating a new one on a restart. Maybe a clue?
Also, use Activity Monitor to see what processes are running. Should not be much if you are not running anything, so maybe you see a clue there also.

Activity Monitor had been showing some initial CPU spikes as high as 190% when first trying to access my Thunderbay 4.

Although I had said that disabling iCloud Drive didn't seem to have an effect on the issue, that may not be the case after all. I re-enabled iCloud Drive and then did the following:

In System Settings, under Apple ID > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Options, I unchecked “Desktop & Documents Folders" to disable iCloud from constantly trying to sync those locations. Since doing so, accessing my Thunderbay 4 through the Open/Save dialogue seems to have returned to more reasonable access speeds.

@midihead7 

Thats plausible. Keep watching and lets see if that was it. Hard to imagine it would be that drastic, but who knows!

I spoke too soon Today it's back to being slow again when accessing the drive through the Open/Save dialogue. It's so frustrating. No other external drives have this issue, only my Thunderbay 4.