EXFAT performance issues on MacOS?

[Mr Technician]

Let me briefly explain my situation:

 

I'm an IT intern at a consulting company but have recently crossed over extensively to the graphics department. I was given a Mac because of file path issues so our networked Premiere projects all map correctly. My video files are on an external drive formatted in EXFAT, which I formatted as such so it would work on both my Mac and my PC when I was using the latter for editing as well. I now only need to use my Mac for editing but am facing almost constant stutters playing back video in quicktime and freezes in Premiere that make it incredibly frustrating to work. Even Finder has crashed multiple times while searching for files forcing me to restart my Mac. I don't have the model currently but I know it's a USB 3.0 2TB drive. Is it likely that the file system is causing the issue? The other editors are using similar generic drives as well without problems, so my next step is to reformat the drive to HFS+ (I believe APFS is only for SSDs and flash memory) and see if that helps.

[DrMacintosh]

49 minutes ago, ThatFlashCat said:

My video files are on an external drive formatted in EXFAT

 

49 minutes ago, ThatFlashCat said:

I don't have the model currently but I know it's a USB 3.0 2TB drive.

Without knowing the specifics of your drive or your colleges drives, I'm going to assume that the reason you are seeing poor performance is because of the read speed limitations of a 2TB USB 3.0 HDD. 

 

Which model Mac did they give you? If there the possibility of getting a Thunderbolt drive? 

49 minutes ago, ThatFlashCat said:

so my next step is to reformat the drive to HFS+ (I believe APFS is only for SSDs and flash memory) and see if that helps.

Apple made optimizations to APFS that benefits SSDs the most, but there are benefits to HDDs as well. I would stick with HFS+ for compatibility reasons though. 

[Mr Technician]

10 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

 

Without knowing the specifics of your drive or your colleges drives, I'm going to assume that the reason you are seeing poor performance is because of the read speed limitations of a 2TB USB 3.0 HDD. 

 

Which model Mac did they give you? If there the possibility of getting a Thunderbolt drive? 

Apple made optimizations to APFS that benefits SSDs the most, but there are benefits to HDDs as well. I would stick with HFS+ for compatibility reasons though. 

I just ran down to the graphics department and found the model of the drives they use. I was surprised to find that they are just USB 2.0 drives:

https://www.amazon.com/BUFFALO-MiniStation-Portable-Drive-HD-PCF1-0U3BD/dp/B01NAOGL9D

 

None of the editors have any issues with performance using these drives. Read speed shouldn't be an issue in Quicktime for either drive since the playback is just sequential read and none of the files are especially high bitrate, unless mine is especially fragmented for whatever reason.

 

The Seagate drive I have is this: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-STBV3000100/dp/B00834SJS0?th=1

 

I think I'm facing file corruption too though, I tried connecting the exFAT drive to my windows machine and it immediately prompted to repair the drive. My hope is that a different drive formatted in HFS+ will fix the issue, but until I can get a new copy of the files on a new drive I'm stuck, which is unfortunate for scheduling reasons.

 

Edit: Something is clearly wrong with this drive. I connected it to my Mac and opened a folder containing three files from a go pro. I tried to open one in quicktime and quicktime appeared in the dock but never actually opened, while finder was stuck with a spinning rainbow wheel. Eventually the drive disconnected itself and there is now a "drive not ejected properly" warning.

 

Edit 2: I ran a benchmark of the seagate drive on my windows machine and it has as sequential read of 174 MB/s and a sequential write of 183 MB/s, which is definitely faster than the USB 2.0 drives the other guys are using.

[Video Beagle]

I've found exFAT to never be as good as it's supposed to be.  I think, though, my problems with it were always on the windows side than the mac side....been a long time since I bothered with it.

 

[Mr Technician]

3 hours ago, Video Beagle said:

I've found exFAT to never be as good as it's supposed to be.  I think, though, my problems with it were always on the windows side than the mac side....been a long time since I bothered with it.

 

Yep I'm hoping I can get an HFS+ formatted copy of the files in question soon, or figure out why they aren't using network drives for their media assets in the first place.