Finder is extremely slow in listing external HDD folders with large number of files

Hi,

I'm not sure, though it could be possible that your MacBook Pro is creating Spotlight index when listing your large number of files on external drive at the same time.

But a few hours is too slow.

You need to put some in Folders. The simplest way to speed up the display of many files, is to NOT have them all at the same level in ONE folder with Icon views turned on. Put clumps of them into Folders.

if you simply put a few hundred at a time into folder, you could (compatively quickly) get the contents of one folder at a time to come up. But if you are doing that work, you should create some underlying logic to the folders that makes sense to YOU.

if you use a view in Finder that does NOT include an Icon preview, it will be relatively faster, such as Column view with Icon = None.

You could drop arbitrary clumps Into folders to reduce the disasater of 16,000 files being viewed in ONE window.

I don't know how well Finder performance would scale if you put huge numbers of files all at the same level, instead of using subfolders to break things up.

It would depend on the algorithms which Apple uses to do things like sorting files within a window, and painting the visible contents of a window in response to changes. An inefficient algorithm might have acceptable performance with "ordinary" numbers of files, and only reveal itself when you threw huge numbers of files at it.

Finder is optimized to SHOW more modest numbers of files to YOU (a person). The underlying File System (what you see in Terminal) is not especially slow, but is not as easy to understand, either.

Even on a really fast drive with lots of extra space, 16,000 files on the same level (not in folders) will be slow. With preview-icons showing, it will still be unusably slow, regardless of drive speed. That is too many files NOT in folders.

The fundamental deficiency here is far, far, far, too many files attempting to be displayed at once, WITH previews visible.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

Even on a really fast drive with lots of extra space, 16,000 files on the same level (not in folders) will be slow.

Aside: The filesystem (MFS) shipped with System 1.0 on the original Mac did not support true subdirectories. Folders were just a Finder illusion; everything was stored at the same (and only!) level on the disk.

When the Mac Plus came out, with a SCSI expansion interface, and with a new filesystem (HFS) that had support for true subdirectories, that was a big step for actually being able to make use of hard disks. Back then, I believe hard disks probably only held 5 – 20 MB (not GB or TB). But even on that size of a drive, you didn't want to have all of your files stored at the same level, especially given the much slower processors and I/O speeds of the day.

"Finder is extremely slow in listing external HDD folders with large number of files: Finder is extremely slow in showing external HDD folders which have about 16000 files (all photos) on my M3 Pro. whats the best way to view the files? I have a windows laptop as well and that has not problem although its a bit slow atleast shows up in a few minutes, but Mac either lists them after a few hours or worse some times, does show any. any suggestions here?"

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It's Time for a Higher-Storage Hard Drive:

When there is low-available storage, hard drives can overheat, and reading and writing can become slow, quickly leading to a potential hard drive failure. So, get a hard drive with twice the storage, and then transfer all of the files over to it.

see below