You can transfer files using rsync over SSH without needing to mount the drive which should give you better speeds.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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oh that's good to know! I'll definitely try using rsync next time I need to move something over 🤞
FYI you just replace the destination with username@IP:filelocation like this that I use to backup my laptop to my server
rsync -av --delete /home/me me@192.168.1.2:/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/Backups/PCs/Laptop/home
saving this comment. thank you!
Why would rsync be faster? SSH traffic is encrypted, it's usually slower than normal file transfers
SMB is also encrypted
You don't want it any other way
.. so is ssh?
I dunno. I suspect it's the GUI file manager but don't know for certain.
SMB on MacOS has had performance issues for a long, long time. It doesn't implement SMB very well, and all the Samba hackery people need to go through to work around it is basically just lived with. rsync is much better because of this.
I’m going to try this, SMB support on Mac has been a thorn in my side for years
Can you export the share as SMB and NFS at the same time? It'll probably be faster mounted with NFS
I don't know if I did something wrong, but NFS only let me see one at the mounted root level. I couldn't navigate the directory tree
You might have to patch your nfs config; the default one supplied by Apple is using an older protocol. Run this and reboot:
printf "\nnfs.client.mount.options = vers=4\n" | sudo tee -a "/etc/nfs.conf" &> /dev/null
thank you!
You'll need to export each volume individually I would expect, are you saying you could only see one volume?
no, it was weird. I could only see the folder I set up for NFS. for example, on folder media, I could see the subdirectories of music, movies, etc, but not their contents. Then if i set up NFS on movies I could mount movies send then see it. It was really weird
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NFS | Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency |
| SMB | Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #244 for this comm, first seen 18th Apr 2026, 13:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Why is this better than what you do with the Finder GUI? I’d just like to understand the mechanism.
there seems to be issues with the apple silicon smb implementation that's absolutely abysmal and painful in performance. But once I mounted the shares this way, it became tolerable even in finder
Ah, if it's limited to Apple silicon maybe that's why. Ive never noticed any particular speed problems on any of my Macs (2004 or so through 2019)
from what I've read online, it's only Apple silicon, not Intel macs
Apples implementation of SMB has always been abysmal. I’ve been using Mac’s for close to 20 years now, and connecting to SMB shares has always been a pain. IMO, it’s gotten better recently (since they dumped AFP and were forced to work better with SMB). For whatever reason, it has always been slow to connect through Finder. Not sure there has been much progress on that front…
Really makes you wonder what Apple uses internally, because it must not be SMB!
I regularly get 100-200MByte/sec throughput to the Linux, Mac, and Synology SMB servers in my home
My SMB slowness has always been when copying a lot of files, the Finder does something really slow and weird when trying to figure out if the destination can be copied to (dunno if it's checking for existing files with the same name or what). Once the actual transfer is going it's fast, but then it hits the next file and pauses for several seconds while it's doing something
I'll have to do some perf tests to see if the client seems slower than others with small io/metadata.
But that has definitely always been the weakest area of networked storage - small, transactional workloads. Latency is the killer there, and there's always going to be higher latency than local storage (although some of the super low latency expensive rdma stuff gets pretty close).
The way to mitigate that is to do copies that are multithreaded. Unfortunately most consumer file copiers out there are terrible at this. rclone definitely will do it but is CLI. Parallel rsync is also possible from CLI and works great but need utilities. I like Carbon Copy Cloner personally which at least kicks off 2 rsyncs
Edit: Apparently freefilesync will also do parallel copies and is at least GUI and somewhat user friendly. I haven't tried it, though. Or at least not for a super long time.
It’s difficult to know of any random person is differentiating between Intel Macs or not when they say Apple silicon these days. This is the first I’ve heard of this.
I experience SMB slowness over the internet, but not locally, on my Intel and ARM Macs. (I’m forced to use smb over the internet via VPN for work.)
I’m gonna try these commands sometime this week to see if it improves things.
I don't see a suggestion to use MACFuse here, so I'll just drop this here: https://macfuse.github.io/
Copy your ssh pub key to the device ssh-copy-id user@hostname
Then just mount it:
sshfs user@hostname:/remote/path ~/mnt/myfiles \
-o reconnect \
-o ServerAliveInterval=15 \
-o ServerAliveCountMax=3 \
-o follow_symlinks \
-o IdentityFile=~/.ssh/id_rsa
Samba is a piece of shit because it's not serialized. Use something else.
What!? I've been looking to switch but the others options are complicated and I can't connect all my devices.