Selecting an External drive in Photoshop save window takes forever to load

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 9, 2024
1 reply
1156 views

For some reason, only in Photoshop, whenever I save a file, I'll hit Cmd+S, it will bring up the save dialog, and as soon as I select an external drive to save to, it will take anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes to load the drive so I can save the file. However, if I am saving to a folder that already exists, I can search for it on said drive and it will find it right away and I am able to save it. But if I click on the main folder in my sidebar, it will take it forever to load it. It doesn't do it with the internal drive. I have tried to reindex the drive, to no avail. And to throw one more strange thing in there, this problem comes and goes. Everything will work fine for like a week, and then it will just take forever to save and be like that for weeks, then randomly it will start working again. The drive in question is an external SSD NVME, formatted to MacOS Extended (Journaled) and Photoshop has full access to the drive. I am on an M1 Max, 64GB, running Mac OS 13.6.6 and Photoshop 25.6.0..

macOS

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D Fosse

Community Expert

Don't save directly to external drives.

Save locally, then copy over. Read this:

https://helpx.adobe.com/vn_vi/photoshop/kb/networks-removable-media-photoshop.html

Conrad_C

Community Expert

There’s a passage in that Adobe article that I didn't notice before. It seems to help address an ambiguity that was leading some to believe that Photoshop doesn’t support external hard drives, because it helps distinguish the difference between network drives/network attached storage (NAS), and external hard drives/direct attached storage (DAS). It clearly states that Photoshop supports the use of DAS external hard drives (end bold formatting is mine):

Important: External hard drives should work with Photoshop without a problem, although depending on how they are connected, might be slower than working with files on your internal drive. Testing against these drives by temporarily disabling them and working exclusively on an internal drive is appropriate. However, Adobe is not stating that there should be regular problems storing files and working with external hard disks.

So, there should be no problem using directly attached external volumes. If there is a significant delay loading a specific volume, that is worth troubleshooting as we are doing here.

By the way, I am also using macOS 13.6.6 on an M1 Mac with all originals on external SSDs, and I have not generally seen that problem using multiple Adobe apps with those files on external direct attached storage.

However, I did recently have a problem where one of my external NVMe SSDs was taking forever to mount. It was increasingly annoying, because I had other similar drives that mounted right away. One day I decided to open Apple Disk Utility and run First Aid on that slow-mounting SSD, and it reported finding problems with the file system that it said it couldn’t fix. So I copied all of the files to another drive, reformatted the troublesome SSD, and copied all the files back onto it. Problem solved, no more delay. Now, I can’t guarantee this is the same cause of or fix for your problem, but if you haven’t recently run First Aid on the SSD, it would be worth doing.

Also, your SSD is formatted Mac OS Extended (all of mine are now formatted as APFS). Technically that should be OK, and should not be related to such a long access delay, but it’s just another difference I noticed. If you do decide reformatting is in order, consider trying APFS for the performance and efficiency benefits, unless you need that SSD to be read by older Macs that don’t understand APFS.

davescm

Community Expert

As I read this, they're not saying there will be categorically no problems. They're saying there won't necessarily be problems.
By @D Fosse

The first line literally says “External hard drives should work with Photoshop without a problem.”

The article is somewhat contradictory. Whilst it does state that external drives should work without a problem, it also goes on to talk about the issues that can be encountered with removable drives and the recommended workflow to save to a local drive. The most reliable will always be a non-removable drive permanently connected in the PC with no external cables to be knocked or develop issues.

The drive itself is no more or less reliable, internally or externally, it just takes those movable connectors out of the equation.

Dave

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