Syncing node to usb 3.0 drive taking ages I'm trying to make a bitcoin app and would like to use a full node so I purchased a 128gb usb 3.0 drive to store it on. I use an early 2014 macbook air: 1.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3. Is processing being throttled by the usb connection? Drive is formatted as mac os extended journaled.

Using bitcoin core, it is syncing very slowly. After almost 24 hours it says last received block was generated 2 years 3 weeks ago. The sync bar is about 1/8 of the way done. Any thoughts or recommendations would be helpful.
Increasing the database cache should help a lot to reduce disk I/O. For example dbcache=400 (100 MB is the default).