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M Szil
M Szil
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I bought a group of Seagate Expansion portable 4TB drives to harvest and install as a low-power RAID group. I've been testing them before breaking their cases open in case one has an infant mortality failure (since I'll lose warranty once opened).

They all seem to work fine except one drive has wildly fluctuating write speeds - at times it hums along at 120MB/sec, but more often it slows way down - anywhere between 10MB and 10kB/sec. During a bulk copy, I had a 600MB file take ~4minutes. It also may hang at the end of a copy operation taking several minutes to stop being busy (trying to shut down Ubuntu caused it to hang for several minutes while I'm assuming the drive or driver-SW timed out).

In a sense the drive seems to be technically working fine - it never reports an error, SMART only shows some historical timeout issues, you can read/write from it, no noises, etc. Not sure if "very slow" is grounds for a return. But obviously something is going on. Any suggestions? I've been doing a bulk copy of 150k files/~1TB which looks it will take about 20hours (been going for 14.5 hours so far with 200GB remaining). Once it finishes I'll do the same operation on another drive in the group to provide a baseline.

Thanks.

Notes:

  • I've tried this on 2 different PCs (one Windows using File explorer, one Ubuntu using Nautilus)
  • both PCs have USB3 controllers (used the same setup to test the other drives in the goup I'm planning to harvest)
  • also tried multiple USB3 cables.

I bought a group of Seagate Expansion portable 4TB drives to harvest and install as a low-power RAID group. I've been testing them before breaking their cases open in case one has an infant mortality failure (since I'll lose warranty once opened).

They all seem to work fine except one drive has wildly fluctuating write speeds - at times it hums along at 120MB/sec, but more often it slows way down - anywhere between 10MB and 10kB/sec. During a bulk copy, I had a 600MB file take ~4minutes. It also may hang at the end of a copy operation taking several minutes to stop being busy (trying to shut down Ubuntu caused it to hang for several minutes while I'm assuming the drive or driver-SW timed out).

In a sense the drive seems to be technically working fine - it never reports an error, SMART only shows some historical timeout issues, you can read/write from it, no noises, etc. Not sure if "very slow" is grounds for a return. But obviously something is going on. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

I bought a group of Seagate Expansion portable 4TB drives to harvest and install as a low-power RAID group. I've been testing them before breaking their cases open in case one has an infant mortality failure (since I'll lose warranty once opened).

They all seem to work fine except one drive has wildly fluctuating write speeds - at times it hums along at 120MB/sec, but more often it slows way down - anywhere between 10MB and 10kB/sec. During a bulk copy, I had a 600MB file take ~4minutes. It also may hang at the end of a copy operation taking several minutes to stop being busy (trying to shut down Ubuntu caused it to hang for several minutes while I'm assuming the drive or driver-SW timed out).

In a sense the drive seems to be technically working fine - it never reports an error, SMART only shows some historical timeout issues, you can read/write from it, no noises, etc. Not sure if "very slow" is grounds for a return. But obviously something is going on. Any suggestions? I've been doing a bulk copy of 150k files/~1TB which looks it will take about 20hours (been going for 14.5 hours so far with 200GB remaining). Once it finishes I'll do the same operation on another drive in the group to provide a baseline.

Thanks.

Notes:

  • I've tried this on 2 different PCs (one Windows using File explorer, one Ubuntu using Nautilus)
  • both PCs have USB3 controllers (used the same setup to test the other drives in the goup I'm planning to harvest)
  • also tried multiple USB3 cables.
Source Link
M Szil
M Szil
  • 21
  • 3

One hard drive in a group is much slower

I bought a group of Seagate Expansion portable 4TB drives to harvest and install as a low-power RAID group. I've been testing them before breaking their cases open in case one has an infant mortality failure (since I'll lose warranty once opened).

They all seem to work fine except one drive has wildly fluctuating write speeds - at times it hums along at 120MB/sec, but more often it slows way down - anywhere between 10MB and 10kB/sec. During a bulk copy, I had a 600MB file take ~4minutes. It also may hang at the end of a copy operation taking several minutes to stop being busy (trying to shut down Ubuntu caused it to hang for several minutes while I'm assuming the drive or driver-SW timed out).

In a sense the drive seems to be technically working fine - it never reports an error, SMART only shows some historical timeout issues, you can read/write from it, no noises, etc. Not sure if "very slow" is grounds for a return. But obviously something is going on. Any suggestions?

Thanks.