bitcoin core cant sync on mac help

I am on a mac and it is taking forever to sync a new node to the chain. I am doing it on an external hard drive but it got to about 35% and has just slowed down to 0.01% progress increasing per hour. I don't think I will ever catch up. I updated my bitcoin.conf file with some suggested settings and see no improvement. At this point I would like to just download all the blocks separately in a torrent if possible. Does anyone have a link to a torrent with that is relatively up to date for getting all the block data? Or any suggestions for why this node is failing to sync quicker? Thanks