u/Foreign-Lime5100

Hi all - I recently purchased a MacBook Pro M5, and don’t get me wrong it’s fantastic. However - today I decided to transfer about 7000 items from my photos app to an external HDD. First 10-15 minutes it was super quick, large videos were moving fast, screen constantly updating with floods of new imported images to the HDD, but once it started to heat up it slowed to about 1 image per minute after about 5000 exports. I searched around and saw that the MBP’s throttle performance when it gets too hot and that’s fine I get it, so I stuck a fan in front of it, and as it cooled down the transfer became damn fast again, 50-100 exports a minute including video files. Now I understand MacBooks turn their fans on automatically but I’ve only ever heard one of the two fans come on once and it wasn’t today. The left side fan has a small airflow feel but the right side nothing, even when clearly it was under a lot of thermal stress. Do I have a problem with my fans? Though it was hot, was it still not “hot enough” to turn both my fans up to speed? Is it normal for it to perform that poorly when transferring files and doing NOTHING else?