best way to transfer data from Mac to ext4/omv for a plex server

Network would be quicker and easier. No USB 3.0 and it is slow. USB 3.0 can also drop out for various reasons, where as network wont. ( I am backing up one of my OMV servers to an external drive and like an idiot I thought I would try it through windows 10, so it is crawling along - I am using eSATA and the slow speed is down to the motherboard eSATA which is limited to SATA II. I tried it with USB 3.0 and every time it got to 85Gb transferred, the USB drive dropped out. eSATA is consistent and what I should have done is connected to OMV via eSATA and mounted the drive copying that way.. Anyway I digress..) What you could do is set the Mac mini or OMV Pi as a DHCP server and directly connect the two with LAN and transfer that way. It should speed things up as no router or other network traffic to get in the way..

Zitat von jata1

USB drive attached to the M2U

That's weird since the only reason to buy such a M2U could be the 'native SATA' that allows at least for some ok-ish sequential read performance.

Anyway: if your USB disk enclosure is USB2 how should there be any performance difference if you copy over network or directly (USB2 will be the bottleneck, you copy with 35 MB/s on average with large files, if there are tons of small files it will take much longer regardless which connection you use). Only if your USB disk enclosure is USB3 and the Mac Mini is from 2012 or younger it could be theoretically faster to directly attach the disk but since you would need FUSE to access any reasonable Linux filesystem it will be a lot slower (using HFS+ on Linux would be even more weird)

In general: Always use EITHER AFP OR SMB to copy data over from a Mac to a Linux box and stay with this protocol and filesharing daemon (Samba or Netatalk) forever from then on. Main reason (no one is willing to understand/accept): filename encoding problems (macOS uses UTF-8 decomposed while the rest of the world mostly prefers precomposed so umlauts get broken while visually looking ok and then macOS also maps some special characters in a special way which Netatalk deals with properly but Samba only with latest version and appropriate settings -- take an hour and see here wrt the challenges involved)

Edit: With Plex it's most probably not a problem since Plex might take care of filename/encoding issues already and stores the stuff with 'sane' names (no idea, never looked into details. But with iTunes for example it happens exactly that way. If you import a song from 'R.E.M.' on a Mac and the song gets imported into the library iTunes will take care that the first layer of the directory structure is called 'R.E.M_' -- underscore instead of trailing period -- since iTunes tries to prevent you getting in trouble when you want to copy your music later over to Windows since Windows for historical reasons can't cope with directory names ending on either a space or a period --> 'R.E.M.' is an illegal directory name in Windows depending on the local fs used there)