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Time Machine drive mounting delay

Started by Bcpv , Feb 22 2024 05:44 AM

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7 replies to this topic

#1 Bcpv

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Posted 22 February 2024 - 05:44 AM

Recently I purchased a Seagate 4TB one-touch drive for use as a Time Machine backup for my M1 iMac 16GB RAM 1TB internal SSD running macOS 14.3.1.

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/products/external-hard-drives/one-touch-external-drives/

The drive seems to be taking longer and longer to mount when I plug it in. I've run Disk Utility and no problems have been found. I've left the drive plugged for extended periods to allow indexing to complete. But still the problem persists, now taking at least 3 minutes for the drive to mount. As an experiment I've used a smaller capacity (1TB) HDD (i.e. NOT an SSD) as a secondary TM backup and it consistently mounts in under 30 seconds. Note that Time Machine seems to initialise any new drive in APFS format which does not seem to be ideal for non-SSD devices. Is this delay something I have to live with or are there any other issues I could investigate?

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#2 JohnC_21

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Posted 22 February 2024 - 11:21 AM

Does it mount faster if you format the drive as exFAT?

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#3 Bcpv

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Posted 22 February 2024 - 11:58 AM

Does it mount faster if you format the drive as exFAT?

Having backed up my Mac to my smaller Time Machine drive and to my Carbon Copy Cloner drive, I removed the Seagate from the list of backup drives and reformatted as exFAT. The now empty exFAT formatted drive mounted in about 10 seconds! So maybe a large capacity SSD would be better in terms of mounting time and, of course, file transfer speed but they are not cheap!

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#4 greg18

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Posted 22 February 2024 - 12:06 PM

One touch drives take longer because of the hardware encryption built into them. Time Machine only uses APFS, no other format if running the latest versions of MacOS.

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#5 Bcpv

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Posted 22 February 2024 - 01:47 PM

One touch drives take longer because of the hardware encryption built into them. Time Machine only uses APFS, no other format if running the latest versions of MacOS.

Well as long as the drive remains healthy, I will just have to accept that. I originally thought the drive might have had some other issues that Disk Utility couldnt spot. Yes I knew about recent macOS versions only using APFS but I should have known about the encryption but clearly didnt fully rtfm! Thanks to all for your responses

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#6 Pkshadow

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Posted 22 February 2024 - 06:04 PM

Can keep a eye here for prices : https://pricespy.co.uk/computers-accessories/storage-media/hard-drives--c355 a 179 pounds for a 16gig Iron Wolf is pretty good price.

as well can check between the 2.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pc-components/storage/internal-hard-drives-hdd

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#7 Bcpv

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Posted 23 February 2024 - 04:30 AM

Can keep a eye here for prices : https://pricespy.co.uk/computers-accessories/storage-media/hard-drives--c355 a 179 pounds for a 16gig Iron Wolf is pretty good price.

as well can check between the 2.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pc-components/storage/internal-hard-drives-hdd

Will do - thanks

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#8 pelorustech

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Posted 06 March 2024 - 02:50 AM

You can click on the Time Machine icon in the Apple menu bar and select "Skip verification". If that makes no changes, test the performance of the two drives in Mac Safe Mode.