Incredibly slow encrypted external drives

[wealthychef]

I am going to be going on a mobile lifestyle, so I encrypted my laptop hard drive and the performance is great, no noticeable effect on speed. However, I bought a couple Seagate USB drives and encrypted them for safety's sake, and they are so incredibly slow. Is this a temporary situation or will they always be very very slow. I get lags of greater than a minute to list directories. It's absolutely unusable. Is there a better solution for security than Apple's encryption? Thanks.

 

[honestone]

First, let me say that none of my drives (internal or external) are encrypted. Beyond that, what are the rotational speeds of the Seagate USB drives? I have two external, 1 TB Seagate drives that spin at 7200 rpm, and they perform good enough, via a Firewire 800 connection for either of my machines. Also, do those Seagate drives have USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 ports? That will also make a difference.

 

[RobAlex]

I don't think the kind of sluggishness wealthychef is reporting can be explained by rotational speed or even using usb 2. I have a similar problem: I'm using CrashPlan as my backup software. It backs up online and to local external drives. It uses encryption. Backing up to a Seagate Passport or a USB memory stick goes at speeds under 1Mbs! The same software and hardware on my Lenovo running windows 10 gets about 47Mbs. I have been unable to figure out the problem so if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.