External HDs Slow to Mount on Mac
Hello,
I run three external Western Digital My Book HDs used for photo/file storage and redundant back-ups of those files. Not too long after updating my Mac to OS 13 (Ventura) I noticed two of the three drives taking a while to mount. One of them takes 5-10 minutes to mount & the other 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. The third one mounts immediately just as they all used to. In trying to figure this out, I noticed in Activity Monitor that the two unmounted drives are running "fsck_exfat," which come off the Activity Monitor list after they do mount. Once mounted, the drives operate normally and with the same speed as always. My questions; is fsck always supposed to run on the external drives prior to mounting when my Mac boots/reboots? If so, why is it suddenly taking so long? Is this behavior related to the update to Ventura or just coincidental? Does it mean there's something going bad on the drives, or??? Note: the one taking the longest to mount is only 1-1/2 years old and has 1.5TB of data on it out of 6TB capacity - the other two are 4TBs and 5+ years old. If fsck shouldn't be running on those externals each time the computer boots/reboots, how do I disable fsck or prevent it from running on those drives unless I call for it?
Thanks,
Jace K.
iMac 27″, macOS 13.0