EXPERT ADVICE
Our resident genius solves your Mac and iOS problems
Contact us
Email your queries and your questions to genius@macformat.com
Disk Images are holding us up
If you use Disk Images much, you’ll surely have noticed how slow they can be. When you’ve paid good money for a screamingly quick M1 Max and a small ransom for fast storage, it comes as a shock when writing files to an encrypted Disk Image can be as slow as to a cheap hard drive.
Much of the problem must stem from their most widespread use to deliver software, which only requires reading the Disk Image. But they’re increasingly being used to write to, for protecting sensitive information by encryption, as shared backup storage, and now for Virtual Machines in the new wave of lightweight virtualisation apps.
While sparse bundles do perform better than regular .dmg files, adding encryption can make writing to them slow to a crawl. We eagerly await the work of Apple’s engineers to fix this.