Thanks - this is still relevant today! Seeing 140MB/s reads on a 2.5" disk but only ~29MB/s writes. Make sure you safely eject people. In my case, I'm going to only enable write caching only during this importing period then will disable it again to be safe.
I have a bunch of 2.5" seagate expansion drives and backup plus drives. The backup plus drives with 3 year warranty used to be fine up until about 6 months ago and then they now all have started having poor performance which this fixes. I have no idea why all the cheaper standard expansion drives don't have the issue, and why it only all of sudden started to happen to the slim backup plus ones. Its the same for Windows 10, 8 and Windows Server.
Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately this did not help with my 8TB Expansion Desk drives with about 1.3 TB free space still. During a 10GB file transfer, it initially showed a great speed, but then quickly dropped off early in the file transfer. I have 2 of these Expansion Desk drives (copies of the same data) and both have become very slow with transfer speeds at best hitting 40 - 60 MBps but fluctuating greatly during a 10 GB file transfer, even dropping to under 1 MBps multiple times during a single file transfer. I then tried the same file on the same USB port and a USB hub, but with a WD 8TB Easy Store with 2.8TB free and the transfer rate is a CONSISTENT 150 MBps (even without write caching which is why I keep it off given the risk - see caevat at the bottom) during the entire file transfer (same source file and source drive as the test with the 2 Seagate drives). The Seagate drives were good initially but despite still having 1.3 TB free, they have slowed dramatically. Ironically the same Seagate drive works fine for transferring files over the network using an nVIdia Shield TV pro 2019 connected to the network via ethernet. Caveat - Keep in mind that enabling 'write caching' does carry an inherent risk as noted in the drive's 'Policy' tab itself - If you lose power or accidentally remove the drive / drive cable without first using the 'Safely Remove Hardware and Media' option and waiting for Windows to confirm it is safe to remove the drive, you risk corrupting and losing the drive's data...
I am glad it worked for you. Some people don't even realize there is an issue I think because they only use it as a backup device only and don't care/notice how slow it goes.
its a windows 10 issue as my drive always was fine but since last update or two my drive now slow and besides that roxio videowave program screwed up when it was not before.
SOLVED my problem but this was NOT the problem. I wish that this worked. :( I had it turned on and from the last time I used it a month ago and today I'm getting about 1MB/ 5 seconds write. The interface is pegged at 100% and is non-usable. I switched cables and ports. Being 3 weeks beyond the warranty hurts as this drive has a total of 41 hours of use as I use it solely for backup. How did I solve it? We, I ran defrag and noticed that I was getting 30MB read and write but still nothing was fixed. Fortunately I had a powered USB hub which I connected up to the PC and instant success. My 1 Year old ASUS ROG X570-E isn't putting out enough current on the USB ports any longer!! That is really sad to see this motherboard act this way after just one year. Other symptoms that the power supplied hub corrected were long start up time to connect the drive as well as the drive was running very hot. I just ordered a USB port tester to verify this issue with lower current or voltage. If this is correct than I'm not over with this problem. Besides, it will be nice to know this information and for $30 it's money well spent to diagnose these problems in the future.
I just bought this drive from Costco and thought the drive was faulty. The drive does not have a power adapter, it takes power from your computer. That said, I was using it on a USB 3.0 bus, non-powered. It failed copying large 4gb files. I thought the drive was dead, but then I remembered that if you plug the USB straight onto the desktop (not the USB hub), it seemed to work much more consistently. Low power might actually make it fail.
I had massive issues with the included usb cable. Been buying them (2.5" ones) to backup a server. I tested about 5 of them and they all resulted in issues on all the cables i tested.
Thanks for the tip. I will try it. I bought a 4TB from the same brand. I having so much problem with it, it reads and writes good sometimes and really bad another time. Having problem with deleting files too. I made 3 partitions and they differ in a lot in fact of reading and writing. Now I new problem occured directory unreadable. So tired of this drive.
It's kinda dangerous fix because if your PC power or USB cable jerks during write operation, you can corrupt not only the file you are copying at that moment but entire partition filesystem table on the drive, so all your files can disappear and you'll need some recovery utility to repair the filesystem. And don't ask me how do I know this :D
what happens if you pop out these external drives and use them as internal drives since write caching is already enabled for a internal? will the speeds be any better for writing plots? currently 50% done in 5 days for a 5TB seagate SMR using i5 3470 (4 cores) with 4GB RAM
I would imagine it would perform like any internal. By design it will never write as fast as a PMR drive, but I am sure it will write faster than being in a usb enclosure. But your i5 is the biggest hamper. More cores = more nonces
My drive was fine before but now super slow out of nowhere and already had this which maybe got a little faster and already knowing why but does not solve my issue. I do have 1.7tb of fragments though and stuff compressed but simply moving from to to drive its slow both ways for me even with this. Windows 10 issue and or maybe drive enclosure.
Fragments should not make it super slow. The drive may be going bad, or the enclosure has issues (I have dealt with both). Smart money is on moving the data to another drive. Then test the bad drive. After moving/copying the data off I would download and run Western Digital Data lifeguard diagnostics on the drive.
AtomicDog yeah, my money is on the enclosure as what tests I did use using seagate software came back fine and crystal disk info said fine other then temp sometimes if laying in side. I have like 4 years worth of hours on it and sometimes before drive would disconnect recently but it hasn’t lately been disconnecting. I’ll check out that wd program too
@@njmaag The WD program is my go-to but I have had bad enclosures that never showed an issue but were bad. I just toss them and order another one. Drives also can report no issue but be bad. Honestly if they get twitchy best to try another enclosure, and if still an issue toss out.
My Seagate 5TB expansion external drive died completely just sitting on the shelf, not even plugged into anything. Plugged it in to my network router to start a backup, and nothing. I verified that the power adapter is supplying 12.5V. The drive is completely dead. Never buying Seagate garbage again.
I have two of them, and one is flakey. I am with you on this. I mean the older seagates were tanks (my main backup drive is 6 years old and running strong), but this newer generation is not so awesome.
WD MyBook can be no better sometimes. And any other external drive, too. So no choices really, other than buying an enclosure and an enterprise class HDD... which would cost twice the price of the external drive.
Thanks - this is still relevant today! Seeing 140MB/s reads on a 2.5" disk but only ~29MB/s writes. Make sure you safely eject people.
In my case, I'm going to only enable write caching only during this importing period then will disable it again to be safe.
I have a bunch of 2.5" seagate expansion drives and backup plus drives. The backup plus drives with 3 year warranty used to be fine up until about 6 months ago and then they now all have started having poor performance which this fixes.
I have no idea why all the cheaper standard expansion drives don't have the issue, and why it only all of sudden started to happen to the slim backup plus ones.
Its the same for Windows 10, 8 and Windows Server.
Thanks for the tip.
Unfortunately this did not help with my 8TB Expansion Desk drives with about 1.3 TB free space still. During a 10GB file transfer, it initially showed a great speed, but then quickly dropped off early in the file transfer. I have 2 of these Expansion Desk drives (copies of the same data) and both have become very slow with transfer speeds at best hitting 40 - 60 MBps but fluctuating greatly during a 10 GB file transfer, even dropping to under 1 MBps multiple times during a single file transfer.
I then tried the same file on the same USB port and a USB hub, but with a WD 8TB Easy Store with 2.8TB free and the transfer rate is a CONSISTENT 150 MBps (even without write caching which is why I keep it off given the risk - see caevat at the bottom) during the entire file transfer (same source file and source drive as the test with the 2 Seagate drives).
The Seagate drives were good initially but despite still having 1.3 TB free, they have slowed dramatically.
Ironically the same Seagate drive works fine for transferring files over the network using an nVIdia Shield TV pro 2019 connected to the network via ethernet.
Caveat - Keep in mind that enabling 'write caching' does carry an inherent risk as noted in the drive's 'Policy' tab itself - If you lose power or accidentally remove the drive / drive cable without first using the 'Safely Remove Hardware and Media' option and waiting for Windows to confirm it is safe to remove the drive, you risk corrupting and losing the drive's data...
Thankyou for this - it's a disgrace that they would sell it as it is out of the box
I am glad it worked for you. Some people don't even realize there is an issue I think because they only use it as a backup device only and don't care/notice how slow it goes.
its a windows 10 issue as my drive always was fine but since last update or two my drive now slow and besides that roxio videowave program screwed up when it was not before.
Apologies if this comes across as a silly question, but how would you do this on a Mac?
SOLVED my problem but this was NOT the problem. I wish that this worked. :( I had it turned on and from the last time I used it a month ago and today I'm getting about 1MB/ 5 seconds write. The interface is pegged at 100% and is non-usable. I switched cables and ports. Being 3 weeks beyond the warranty hurts as this drive has a total of 41 hours of use as I use it solely for backup.
How did I solve it? We, I ran defrag and noticed that I was getting 30MB read and write but still nothing was fixed. Fortunately I had a powered USB hub which I connected up to the PC and instant success. My 1 Year old ASUS ROG X570-E isn't putting out enough current on the USB ports any longer!! That is really sad to see this motherboard act this way after just one year.
Other symptoms that the power supplied hub corrected were long start up time to connect the drive as well as the drive was running very hot.
I just ordered a USB port tester to verify this issue with lower current or voltage. If this is correct than I'm not over with this problem. Besides, it will be nice to know this information and for $30 it's money well spent to diagnose these problems in the future.
I just bought this drive from Costco and thought the drive was faulty. The drive does not have a power adapter, it takes power from your computer. That said, I was using it on a USB 3.0 bus, non-powered. It failed copying large 4gb files. I thought the drive was dead, but then I remembered that if you plug the USB straight onto the desktop (not the USB hub), it seemed to work much more consistently. Low power might actually make it fail.
I had massive issues with the included usb cable.
Been buying them (2.5" ones) to backup a server. I tested about 5 of them and they all resulted in issues on all the cables i tested.
Man I can't even open the properties window on the device manager! this thing is soooo SLOW!! unsable!
Thanks for the tip. I will try it. I bought a 4TB from the same brand. I having so much problem with it, it reads and writes good sometimes and really bad another time. Having problem with deleting files too. I made 3 partitions and they differ in a lot in fact of reading and writing. Now I new problem occured directory unreadable. So tired of this drive.
It's kinda dangerous fix because if your PC power or USB cable jerks during write operation, you can corrupt not only the file you are copying at that moment but entire partition filesystem table on the drive, so all your files can disappear and you'll need some recovery utility to repair the filesystem. And don't ask me how do I know this :D
actually, it's not. The second checkbox below (the one he did not check) is the one you're describing.
what happens if you pop out these external drives and use them as internal drives since write caching is already enabled for a internal? will the speeds be any better for writing plots? currently 50% done in 5 days for a 5TB seagate SMR using i5 3470 (4 cores) with 4GB RAM
I would imagine it would perform like any internal. By design it will never write as fast as a PMR drive, but I am sure it will write faster than being in a usb enclosure. But your i5 is the biggest hamper. More cores = more nonces
My drive was fine before but now super slow out of nowhere and already had this which maybe got a little faster and already knowing why but does not solve my issue. I do have 1.7tb of fragments though and stuff compressed but simply moving from to to drive its slow both ways for me even with this. Windows 10 issue and or maybe drive enclosure.
Fragments should not make it super slow. The drive may be going bad, or the enclosure has issues (I have dealt with both). Smart money is on moving the data to another drive. Then test the bad drive. After moving/copying the data off I would download and run Western Digital Data lifeguard diagnostics on the drive.
AtomicDog yeah, my money is on the enclosure as what tests I did use using seagate software came back fine and crystal disk info said fine other then temp sometimes if laying in side. I have like 4 years worth of hours on it and sometimes before drive would disconnect recently but it hasn’t lately been disconnecting. I’ll check out that wd program too
@@njmaag The WD program is my go-to but I have had bad enclosures that never showed an issue but were bad. I just toss them and order another one. Drives also can report no issue but be bad. Honestly if they get twitchy best to try another enclosure, and if still an issue toss out.
Thx!
My Seagate 5TB expansion external drive died completely just sitting on the shelf, not even plugged into anything. Plugged it in to my network router to start a backup, and nothing. I verified that the power adapter is supplying 12.5V. The drive is completely dead. Never buying Seagate garbage again.
I have two of them, and one is flakey. I am with you on this. I mean the older seagates were tanks (my main backup drive is 6 years old and running strong), but this newer generation is not so awesome.
WD MyBook can be no better sometimes. And any other external drive, too. So no choices really, other than buying an enclosure and an enterprise class HDD... which would cost twice the price of the external drive.
Nah, good luck with SG 8GB!