USB Port Slow Problems on Mac: Why and How to Fix?

How to fix my USB port are slow problems on Mac?

According to the reasons mentioned above, this article will present different fixes respectively to deal with the USB port slow problems on Mac.

Change the slow USB port to fit the fast USB drive

The transferring and reading speeds are determined by the USB port. When you insert a fast USB drive into the slow port, the speed is going to down apparently.

For example, if you plug a USB 3.0 drive into a USB 2.0 port, the maximum transferring speed is limited to 480Mbps, which is 10 times slower than inserting it into a USB 3.0 port.

Therefore, dealing with the USB port works slowly when transferring files, trying a fast USB port is indispensable.

Disable the Spotlight Search for the USB drive

The Spotlight Search is a wonderful helper, which can figure out where every files or data are. Hence, you're able to find the files and data without effort.

However,  this feature may lead to the USB port's slow connection. In this scenario, you can stop the Spotlight Search function on the external drive.

Here is how to stop the Spotlight Search function to improve the USB port read speed:

1. Click the Apple menu and select System Preferences in the dropdown menu.
2. Locate Spotlight and launch it in the home window.
3. Choose the Privacy tab and hit + button.       
   
4. Add the external drive that need not search.

Since the Spotlight stops the feature on the external drive, you can check if the USB works slow still. If it does, try the following additional approaches.

Convert the external drive's file system to APFS

The non-APFS file system drive obviously takes macOS more time to read, which misleads you to ascribe it to the USB port running slow. Under this circumstance, converting the drive's file system to APFS is worth a try. 

Designed for Mac, APFS enables the Mac to read and transfer with fast and quick speed. So, if you want to apply your drive on Mac, the APFS file system is an excellent choice.

Significantly, before converting the drive's file system, backing up all the data and files securely on the drive is a priority, because the converting operation is going to erase all data on the drive.

After completing the backup, you can convert the file system of the external drive then.

1. Connect your external drive to the Mac and launch Disk Utility then.
2. Click the View tab in the main window and select the Show All Devices option.
3. Select your external drive from the left bar of the Disk Utility window.
4. Click Erase button in the home window.
5. Fill in your drive's name and select APFS in the Format box.       
   
6. Choose GUID Partition Map in the Scheme box, then hit Erase button to confirm your actions.
7. When the erasing operation ends, hit Done, and you will have an APFS-formatted drive.       
   

With the compatible APFS file system, Mac can recognize this external drive with fabulous speed, let alone transfer files and data. The USB port slow problems are readily solved then.

During the converting process, you may encounter the convert to APFS option is not available or greyed out problems. Don't worry, this problem can be fixed easily.

Check the USB port and cable on the Mac

Frankly speaking, the USB port not working is more like a software or cable issue, instead of the actual hardware failure. 

Firstly, you can check if the port is bad by inserting your external drive into other ports on your Mac, then test the transfer speed and whether the USB port slow problem is solved.

Or, check the cable condition. The easiest way is to switch to another cable, and then try the cable with the same drive to see if the cable works well. If it does, then there is a problem with your cable. If it doesn't, it's possible that your external drive has faulty.

Clone the drive to avoid data loss by drive corruption

If the external drive has some tiny errors, it may cause the USB port reads and transfers data at a slow speed. In this scenario, to avoid data loss due to further drive corruption in the future, the priority is to clone the whole disk to another one.

You can clone the disk by launching the Disk Utility > Choose your destination drive > Click Restore > Choose your corrupted drive > Click Restore to clone.

Clone the disk with iBoysoft DiskGeeker

You may store piles of files and stacks of data on your disk, moving files by copying and pasting will take a long time. iBoysoft DiskGeeker is featured with a Disk Clone function, which enables you to clone the disk sector by sector.

Before cloning, please prepare an empty drive, which should have a larger capacity than your corrupted drive, or at least the same.

Running the clone function of iBoysoft DiskGeeker is easy, you can have an eye over it:

1. Download iBoysoft DiskGeeker and install it on Mac.
2. Insert your corrupted drive to your Mac device.
3. Apply iBoysoft DiskGeeker to clone the disk.

The cloning process can't be terminated once it begins. If the process is terminated accidentally, the disk cloning will resume automatically when the two disks are connected to your Mac again.

Verdict

That the USB port transfers slowly is usual when you transfer data from your external drive to Mac. You can figure out the reasons that cause the USB port to run slow in this article, meanwhile, you can try the approaches provided to fix the tough problem. 

Moreover, a versatile software iBoysoft DiskGeeker can help you achieve the clone disk goal without effort. If you're interested in it, try it now!

FAQ about USB port slow problems on Mac

The USB port slow problems may be caused by kinds of factors, including inserting a fast USB drive to the slow USB port, unstable power supply in the USB port, or a faulty USB cable. All mentioned factors can lead to your USB port running slowly. Besides, the USB port slow connection also occurs when the external drive is corrupted, or your external drive's file system cannot be recognized by Mac.

No, you can't. By default, the disk clone will overwrite all data on the destination disk. But the startup disk contains the operating system and can't be overwritten. So, you can't take the Mac startup disk as the destination disk to clone an external disk to.