Slow Transfer Between External Drives I have two external USB drives connected to my 2012 Mac mini, and am finding transfer speeds between the two to be really slow. I need to transfer 38GB of stuff. With rsync, I was getting ~60MBps. Canceled that and moved to Finder and am getting an estimate of ~9 hours to complete the operation.
I did restart the Mac mini hoping it would improve things, but no change. Thoughts on how to improve this?
A method I use to move large numbers of files is the Terminal mv or cp commands. The first command actually moves directories/files from one location to the other, the other just copies the directories/files. This is much quicker than Finder, which adds a tremendous amount of overhead to the process.
Secondly I strongly suggest you go to System Preferences &gt; Spotlight, and add both external drives into the Privacy pane. This stops Spotlight from indexing the files. The drives can be removed from the pane when you're done if you want these drives indexed.