Performance & battery · Staying light on your Mac
Why does Storage Studio finish jobs faster on one Mac than another?
Short answer: Storage Studio's background budget follows each Mac's free resources, power and activity, so a plugged-in, idle, well-equipped Mac finishes sooner than a busy laptop on battery. Disk and network speed matter too.
Because its background budget follows how much each Mac has free, not a fixed amount. A desktop that's plugged in, mostly idle and has plenty of cores and memory gives Storage Studio more spare room — and Automatic may pick Rich there — so jobs finish sooner.
A laptop on battery, a Mac you're actively using, or one that's warm gets a deliberately smaller budget, so the same job is spread out over more time. Disk speed, the number of files and network speed for cloud work matter too.
If you'd like a job to finish faster, leave the Mac idle and plugged in, or choose Extreme for a while.