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

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.

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.

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

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