Why is it downloading so slow?
February 17, 2025 3:06 PM Subscribe
Downloading 50gb from cloud to external drive. WHY IS IT SO SLOW
Hi! I'm only halfway through a 50gb download from the cloud to an external drive. And it's been 3 hours.
Specs:
-Downloading 50GB zip from Apple data directly to brand new Samsung T7 Shield 1TB SSD drive, via Chrome browser - Calculations say this should only take about 15 minutes. I'm closing in on almost 4 hours now.
-Speed test says I'm at 450mbps, over wifi I'M NOT INTERESTED IN DIRECTLY CONNECTING TO MODEM FOR REASONS
-Running Ventura on Macbook M1 Pro 2021
-Laptop browser is running slow if I try to use it to do anything at all, so not doing that.
-Posting this from my phone over mobile connection (not network wifi to save as much bandwidth as possible). When phone was still on local network, I wasn't haven't speed issues on it.
-No other devices are using network right now
What gives?
I have 6 more 50GB chunks to download after this and that this rate it will take me all week. I work as a producer and have had to download up to 10GB videos over my network before and it's never been a problem, I've always gotten them in seconds or minutes.
Hi! I'm only halfway through a 50gb download from the cloud to an external drive. And it's been 3 hours.
Specs:
-Downloading 50GB zip from Apple data directly to brand new Samsung T7 Shield 1TB SSD drive, via Chrome browser - Calculations say this should only take about 15 minutes. I'm closing in on almost 4 hours now.
-Speed test says I'm at 450mbps, over wifi I'M NOT INTERESTED IN DIRECTLY CONNECTING TO MODEM FOR REASONS
-Running Ventura on Macbook M1 Pro 2021
-Laptop browser is running slow if I try to use it to do anything at all, so not doing that.
-Posting this from my phone over mobile connection (not network wifi to save as much bandwidth as possible). When phone was still on local network, I wasn't haven't speed issues on it.
-No other devices are using network right now
What gives?
I have 6 more 50GB chunks to download after this and that this rate it will take me all week. I work as a producer and have had to download up to 10GB videos over my network before and it's never been a problem, I've always gotten them in seconds or minutes.
In your shoes I'd suspect the cable. Two ways to rule that in or out:
1. Copy a very large file from the laptop to the hard drive and see if it takes a reasonable amount of time.
2. Download a large file directly to the laptop. Doesn't need to be the 50 GB zip, but something in the GB range. If that's fast, that tells you something.
Some chance of a bad drive, too, although I think that's less likely than the cable. All your MacBook ports support USB 4.0 so it's not that you're using the wrong port (although if you're going through a USB hub, you should try going direct to the drive).
posted by Bryant at 3:17 PM on February 17
1. Copy a very large file from the laptop to the hard drive and see if it takes a reasonable amount of time.
2. Download a large file directly to the laptop. Doesn't need to be the 50 GB zip, but something in the GB range. If that's fast, that tells you something.
Some chance of a bad drive, too, although I think that's less likely than the cable. All your MacBook ports support USB 4.0 so it's not that you're using the wrong port (although if you're going through a USB hub, you should try going direct to the drive).
posted by Bryant at 3:17 PM on February 17
Response by poster: The cable is brand new out of the box.
I don't really have space on my local laptop drive to download much, but as of a few days ago it was fine with a 50mb file I had to pull down.
System report says 'Up to 5 Gb/s'.
Directly porting into laptop, no hubs.
posted by greta simone at 3:22 PM on February 17
I don't really have space on my local laptop drive to download much, but as of a few days ago it was fine with a 50mb file I had to pull down.
System report says 'Up to 5 Gb/s'.
Directly porting into laptop, no hubs.
posted by greta simone at 3:22 PM on February 17
The issue is probably related to the fact that your local hard drive is almost out of space - maybe some weirdness going on where temp data is created during the transfer from cloud-local-USB drive. You’ll need to free up space and re-try. Or pull to the local and push to the USB drive.
posted by Wavelet at 3:28 PM on February 17 [3 favorites]
posted by Wavelet at 3:28 PM on February 17 [3 favorites]
If Chrome is running slowly if you try to use it to do anything at all, that indicates something on the computer itself is the problem (rather than the network connection or the external drive). How full is your laptop drive? Does cleaning up the drive help at all?
posted by ssg at 3:32 PM on February 17
posted by ssg at 3:32 PM on February 17
Spooky. Just the other day, I tried using the Samsung T7 Shield 1TB SSD I’ve had working fine for two years, and my transfer speeds were 2.1MB/s (from my Mac to the external SSD, over the USB3 cable that came with the T7).
I confirmed this using the Blackmagic Disk Speed app available on the Mac App Store.
Two things seemed to solve the problem: running the Disk Speed app for long enough to beat the SSD into behaving properly (no idea why this would work, but it only worked until I disconnected the drive), and later wiping the SSD and reformatting it to APFS (from its previous life as HFS+, I think).
Once I reformatted it, the SSD seemed to perform reliably, but I still took it in and had it replaced under warranty (the warranty is three years, Samsung’s site says “take it back where you bought it.”)
Anyway, long answer to say “your external SSD might be acting weird.” Try copying a smallish file to it from the Mac HD and see if the progress bar comes up. That was my first indicator that the SSD was malfunctioning. It shouldn’t even blink at anything less than, I dunno, 100MB, IME.
posted by TangoCharlie at 3:33 PM on February 17
I confirmed this using the Blackmagic Disk Speed app available on the Mac App Store.
Two things seemed to solve the problem: running the Disk Speed app for long enough to beat the SSD into behaving properly (no idea why this would work, but it only worked until I disconnected the drive), and later wiping the SSD and reformatting it to APFS (from its previous life as HFS+, I think).
Once I reformatted it, the SSD seemed to perform reliably, but I still took it in and had it replaced under warranty (the warranty is three years, Samsung’s site says “take it back where you bought it.”)
Anyway, long answer to say “your external SSD might be acting weird.” Try copying a smallish file to it from the Mac HD and see if the progress bar comes up. That was my first indicator that the SSD was malfunctioning. It shouldn’t even blink at anything less than, I dunno, 100MB, IME.
posted by TangoCharlie at 3:33 PM on February 17
If you're able to rule out the SSD and the cable, I'd look at Wifi.
You're not interested in cabling in, but Wifi may be suffering from interference, either due to appliances in your space (bluetooth activity can interfere with 2.4GHz Wifi, so maybe siwtch it to 5GHz wifi) or outside your space (crowded channels).
You can download a free wifi channel scanner to an android device, but iOS doesn't really have available free software that does this. Basically you want to determine which channels are crowded and pick one that's less so.
You'll find that wifi signals on 2.4GHz near you will concentrate near channels 1, 6, 11. You must resist the temptation of picking an empty channel in between; it makes you the interference source, without, in general, improving your signal. The wifi signal is cntered at one of those channels, but actually spreads itself across multiple channels on either side. Pick the least crowded of those 3 channels. Ditto for 5GHz, which uses these channels: lower channels 36, 40, 44, or 48; upper channels 149, 153, 157, 161, 165, 169, or 176. (For whatever reason, 5GHz has a big unused gap between those two groups of channels.)
This looks a lot, but it's pretty simple; you could ask for help from your local available IT nerd.
posted by Sunburnt at 4:19 PM on February 17 [1 favorite]
You're not interested in cabling in, but Wifi may be suffering from interference, either due to appliances in your space (bluetooth activity can interfere with 2.4GHz Wifi, so maybe siwtch it to 5GHz wifi) or outside your space (crowded channels).
You can download a free wifi channel scanner to an android device, but iOS doesn't really have available free software that does this. Basically you want to determine which channels are crowded and pick one that's less so.
You'll find that wifi signals on 2.4GHz near you will concentrate near channels 1, 6, 11. You must resist the temptation of picking an empty channel in between; it makes you the interference source, without, in general, improving your signal. The wifi signal is cntered at one of those channels, but actually spreads itself across multiple channels on either side. Pick the least crowded of those 3 channels. Ditto for 5GHz, which uses these channels: lower channels 36, 40, 44, or 48; upper channels 149, 153, 157, 161, 165, 169, or 176. (For whatever reason, 5GHz has a big unused gap between those two groups of channels.)
This looks a lot, but it's pretty simple; you could ask for help from your local available IT nerd.
posted by Sunburnt at 4:19 PM on February 17 [1 favorite]
My guess would be you're running at iCloud's maximum download speed. I can't find reliable estimates on what speed you should be able to get but lots of folks asking "why are Apple downloads so slow". If I'm right there's absolutely nothing you can do about it but wait.
posted by Nelson at 5:11 PM on February 17
posted by Nelson at 5:11 PM on February 17
I would suspect the speed issue to be throttling by Apple. Their servers do not have infinite capacity and someone downloading 50 gig is going to end up in the slow traffic class.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:12 PM on February 17 [2 favorites]
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:12 PM on February 17 [2 favorites]
Out there guess: Apple thinks your chrome browser downloading 50GB is a bot. Try Safari.
posted by zippy at 9:39 PM on February 17
posted by zippy at 9:39 PM on February 17
Response by poster: New things I've tried based on your suggestions:
Switched to brand new (with new cord) LaCie rugged
Switched to Macbook Pro Air Apple M2
Tried downloading to laptop first
Downloading through Safari
Nothing helped. I'm topping out at 4 mbps download speeds when actually downloading through my internet speed tests keep consistently giving me 350-450mbps.
WTF?
posted by greta simone at 6:41 AM on February 18
Switched to brand new (with new cord) LaCie rugged
Switched to Macbook Pro Air Apple M2
Tried downloading to laptop first
Downloading through Safari
Nothing helped. I'm topping out at 4 mbps download speeds when actually downloading through my internet speed tests keep consistently giving me 350-450mbps.
WTF?
posted by greta simone at 6:41 AM on February 18
Can you connect to iCloud through the Finder rather than through the browser?
posted by donpardo at 6:45 AM on February 18
posted by donpardo at 6:45 AM on February 18
Response by poster: @donpardo I linked my icloud drive in my finder, but after not seeing photos in there then googling to figure out why, apparently iCloud Drive and iCloud photos are distinctly separate systems unless I want to download all photos to my laptop, which I do not bc I do not have 322GB of space. So, back to square one.
posted by greta simone at 7:08 AM on February 18
posted by greta simone at 7:08 AM on February 18
As a person who shares very large video for work, I have a similar problem sometimes with Google Drive. It just chokes on the large transfers. It's unpredictable too, which is very frustrating. I suspect that your problem is on the Apple server side, which would mean there's very little you can do.
One more thing to try though: is there another high-speed network you can try, to verify it's not something weird in your network settings? Even a library free Wi-Fi, or tethering a 5g phone, should give you better speeds than you are seeing now.
If at all possible, I'd ask the originator of these files if there's another method they can use to share them. We use WeTransfer which is meant for exactly this use case, and there is some cost for plans that handle this much data, but is very reliable. Dropbox is also usually decent for large transfers.
And depending on the location it's often still fastest to express ship an SSD.
posted by hovey at 7:36 AM on February 18
One more thing to try though: is there another high-speed network you can try, to verify it's not something weird in your network settings? Even a library free Wi-Fi, or tethering a 5g phone, should give you better speeds than you are seeing now.
If at all possible, I'd ask the originator of these files if there's another method they can use to share them. We use WeTransfer which is meant for exactly this use case, and there is some cost for plans that handle this much data, but is very reliable. Dropbox is also usually decent for large transfers.
And depending on the location it's often still fastest to express ship an SSD.
posted by hovey at 7:36 AM on February 18
Download to local HD first, then move file over to new SSD.
Download to USB media will take tremendous amount of time due to write delays.
posted by kschang at 9:05 AM on February 19
Download to USB media will take tremendous amount of time due to write delays.
posted by kschang at 9:05 AM on February 19
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Do this:
1. Apple menu, choose About this Mac, then choose More Info then scroll down, then choose System Report. If on an older OS, 'System Report' may be on the first window.
2. click the USB tree and find your drive, and see what the connection speed is listed at.
You should see 5Gbps ideally, but if your USB cable is old, it might be 480mbps (more than 10x slower)
posted by soylent00FF00 at 3:16 PM on February 17 [4 favorites]