Copying between apfs and hfs+ external drives *extremely* slow

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Tried copy/paste in finder - copied root-level folders, then seemed to take forever. So I stopped, deleted the folders, and tried again on command line ```cp -R old-drive new-drive``

In one hour it copied 3.2 GB of files.

Given my 660+GB of files on this drive, that’s over 10 days of copying. So now I’m going to try copying individual folders, see if I can find out where the problem is. Obviously, the main problem is that I formatted my old drive to APFS like an idiot. But since any reformatting would still involve copying the data off, I’m kinda stuck. Will report back on progress.

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Is the problem the old drive, or the new one?
You could use something like DiskMark to find out.

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The old drive is 7-8 years of age, which is why I’m replacing it. No known performance issues or bad sectors, just nervous.

I have now copied 38GB by copying one folder at a time. It’s a workable solution.

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You might be interested in this, which also applies to drives other than NAS drives.

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