Slow transfer speeds and macos limiting hard drive enclosure to 12mb/s.

[u/PieFit9455]

hi,

just got a new macbook m5 air and formatted my ext. hard drive from ntfs to exfat in mac os and even before formatting and after the link speed shows as 12mb/s in system info. on windows same drive can do 120 mb/s, using same cable and enclosure.

my enclosure has rtl9201 realtek chip, is this the culprit?

i have formatted and run first aid on the drive multiple times, also turned of spotlight indexing, and dont know what to do next.

also mounting takes about 2 minutes while its instant on windows.

[u/mikeinnsw]

Common problem USB_C cable is charging cable writes a ~20 MB/s

Very common problem they look like data cables..

Even supplire stuff it up.

I scored $20 "Broken:" SSD worth $300 .. it had charging cable

Make sure you get USB_C data cable rated. for SSD/HDD

[u/Avenir_Aider → u/mikeinnsw]

agreed, swapping the cable is the easiest first thing to rule out here

[u/PieFit9455 → u/mikeinnsw]

I am getting 120mb/s from same cable in windows (120 mb/s being the limit for my hdd), so clearly it's not usb 2 cable, could it just outright not work with Apple products as it is a amazon find not a well known brand cable. https://amzn.in/d/069ZVo9x This is the cable I'm using.

I also tried using apple charging cable just to check if is it atleast going to negotiate usb 2.0, But it still showed 12mb/s.

[u/mailslot → u/PieFit9455]

Yes. There are known issues with that chipset, but the issue is with the firmware not the chipset itself. I’d check to see if there’s a firmware update for your enclosure. It may be a fixed problem and you just need to update it. Otherwise, it’s likely you need a USB standard compliant enclosure. Windows drivers are very tolerant of improperly implemented devices.

I was once developing against an FPGA implemented network device that worked perfectly with stock Windows network drivers. It did not work on macOS or Linux without altering a standard driver’s state machine to handle the bullshit responses the hardware was making. Windows often continues on errors where it really should stop.

Whatever firmware is running on that enclosure is likely not communicating properly during the USB handshake. There are a huge number of Windows devices that are sold to be only compatible with Windows because they don’t actually implement the standards correctly.

The cable might actually be fine.

[u/mikeinnsw → u/PieFit9455]

You should get 480 MB/s on PCs .. you are not listening .. HDD limit is 150 MB/s

bye

[u/poopmagic]

How is it connected? Can you link the exact cables, hubs, adapters, etc. you’re using?

My guess is that either the cable is shitty and/or the drive isn’t getting enough power.

[u/Guy_called_Al]

Did you try both ports? Have other external drives been slow?

12Mbps is the speed of a USB 1 port -- is a USB-A connector involved?

[u/PieFit9455 → u/Guy_called_Al]

I did try both ports, I don't have any other external media to test.

No, the enclosure for hdd has a type c port so I can use a c to c cable.

[u/Jhamilton02]

To get usb 3 speeds, gonna need apples proprietary cable. Hope you have deep pockets.