Mounting Hard Drives Very Slow

Have same issue. but only with APFS (Encrypted) drives.

God, I wish it was only 2 minutes for me. This is just insane. I've got 3 4t external drives, formatted exFAT. They load right up in Windows. But even though I eject them properly every time from Windows and they run through a disk scan there fine, when I plug them into the Big Sur Macbook Pro they may take 1-2 minutes, or 10-20. Sometimes I just have to give up and use slower transfering USB sticks. I keep looking for a solution but no luck.

I have the same issue with APFS encrypted drives. I use Monterey 12.4

Same issue with APFS encrypted drives on MacOS 12.4.

I am having the same problem - I have up to 3 APFS external backup drives and mounting then can take up to 20 minute

I'm also having the same problem. Mounting the same external drive on Windows is virtually instantaneous. Is there a way to solve this?

Same here. HDD with 3 partitions, all encrypted. Mounting all of them is a matter of 2-3 minutes.

Started a while ago, even with latest MacOS 12.6 on an M1. You hear the disk working hard. Not sure what it's looking for to make the mount happen. I can only speculate that it tries to mount all of the partitions at once, or in parallel respectively, and then the heads fly back on forth wildly over the disks, since with an external SSD drive things do mount way faster.

Anyone with an update? I did a few mac updates and suddenly, my external hard drive is taking forever to load.

I ran Disk Utility to do First Aid on it and after the process was done, it still took forever.

My specs: Macbook Air M1, 2020, Sonoma OS Ugreen USB-C Multifunction adapter SeaGate 5 TB, formatted to ExFAT

Now, I also have an SD card connected to the Ugreen adapter, and that one loads up immediately,

I'm on a Mac Mini late 2012 here running Bug Sur. I experience the same mentioned huge delays with mounting local and network (SMB) volumes.

I found a solution for speeding up the mounting of network volumes:

Get TinkerTool 8 or whatever works for your OS release and set the following Finder option:

Network Access: Don't create hidden .DS_Store files (Finder views, comments, etc.) - set to enabled Collect all Data first before beginning to display folder contents - set to disabled.

Obviously, when working with large volumes and files, this will slow down the mounting process. Perhaps what we need is the same option for local volumes, but no such setting exists.

I have the same issue, got 2 hard drives

10 Terabytes each

and if I boot computer takes 10-30 minutes to appear

I got a 3rd brand new 18 terabyte drive today and after plugging it in I'm still waiting for it to appear its been almost 30 min...

Can someone help to solve this issue for us?

or has anyone found better ways to avoid these mishaps?

losing date is scary specially when its work and client related.

I use a 14TB and 16TB external HDD. Same problem here.

Same bloody issue. It used to be very fast. Now it's hell slow. It's a 2TB drive. Checked for health and no issues found. Takes anything between 2 to 10 minutes to appear :(

I have the same problem connecting one of my external HDDs. This problem happens just with one of them. I found that connecting this drive to Windows it works correcly but Windows ask me to repair the file system. After repairing, the connection to the Mac is fast as it should be, but after some connections the problem appears again.

I use multiple external HDDs but among them my 16TB Powered HDD always takes more than 30 mins to mount How can I resolve the issue?