NeoFinder Forum

Hello!

I have scanned/indexed HFS-formatted volumes with an acceptable speed (disabled the preview generations for media files in order to speed up this process; for the time being I'm ok with not having preview/thumbnails, but just having the directory/file/size infos).
While this process so far for HFS volumes works ok, I started to also scan/index NTFS-formatted volumes, which MacOS can access officially in read-mode.

One NTFS volume from an external SSD, the other NTFS volume from an internally set up Bootcamp partition on the Mac.
Both NTFS volumes appear as "normal data partitions" to access (since it was not booted from them).

The scanning/indexing process of these 2 NTFS volumes took extensively long compared to HFS volumes, which I scanned earlier and were even larger in capacity and used storage.

NTFS volume 1: 200 GB capacity, used 165 GB.
NTFS volume 2: 100 GB capacity, used 40 GB.

Since I didn't expect such issues in the first place, I didn't took structured notes of the scanning/indexing process from NeoFinder in the first place, so I can only try to recall approximative duration.
NTFS volume 2 took already quite long, which I don't remember really, something between 2-4 hours.
NTFS volume 1 took even more than the other NTFS volume, probably around 6-7 hours.

With both NTFS volumes though I made the same observation:

• at some point in time, the NeoFinder scanning progress indicator will slow down massively. You can see increments of like 30-50 files with a noticeable waiting time between updates of the number of scanned files.

  

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• during this extremely slow progress, it can also be observed in the Activity Monitor the NeoFinder process drops down to a very low CPU activity and remains there for most of the time. Whereas when I scanned HFS volumes I did not observe these drops, but NeoFinder was working "good", and did not "stall" - as it seems to give the impression with NTFS volumes.

  

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The hard-/software specs are:

• Mac Mini 2018, macOS Monterey, version 12.6.6, regular Apple 500GB SSD

• NeoFinder 8.4.1

• Samsung SSD T7, connected via USB-C

The Mac is set up pretty vanilla, almost like a clean test machine, hence it is practically empty.
The Bootcamp partition is installed with a plain vanilla Windows 10 setup.
The other NTFS volume is technically also a Windows 10 system setup (with a few 3rd party software added).
However, it shouldn't matter, as both volumes are just mounted as data volumes at that point in time.

In short: pretty empty "Windows systems"-NTFS volumes were attempted to be scanned by a fresh NeoFinder installation from a pretty clean MacOS system, taking extensively long - in relation to capacity size and used storage - compared to HFS volumes, which were scanned a lot faster and are of even bigger capacity and used size.

My questions therefore:

• Is this a known issue or what can be actually the issue?

• Why is NeoFinder slowing down drastically and continues to operate on that minimal level of operation? Again, it started "normal", but at some point it drops down and stays on that low level of operation.

I let NeoFinder run over night, it finishes finally, so the good thing is it didn't crash. But to wait so many hours for so little volume capacity and even less used size, is suboptimal, especially when the HFS scanning is on a complete different level.

Thanks for any constructive feedback.

The NTFS driver in macOS is indeed extremely slow.

Apple has never fixed that, althought we have reported the problem multiple times in the past.

Same for the ExFAT driver in macOS, unfortunately.

As the NeoFinder Users Guide shows, there are some ways to speed up cataloging a bit:
https://www.cdfinder.de/guide/24/neofin ... prefs.html
Topic: "Catalog of FileType/Creator data"

And last, this forum has some tips as well:

viewtopic.php?t=10


You may also have better speed with third-party NTFS drivers for macOS.