Sloooow Seagate USB External Drive - Why?

[PinkFloydEffect]

I have a USB 3.0 Seagate external drive (ST1000LM024) with very low hours on it that is extremely sluggish and I can not figure out why. It took 5min to transfer a 50Mb file onto it and disk management takes a min or two before the GUI will load....yet it only took 1 second to transfer the 50Mb file off the drive. So I deleted the partitions and created a new volume. I also checked the S.M.A.R.T data with two separate programs both of which show the drive in good health.

The weird thing is I tried it on my laptop with very different results, I was able to transfer the same file from and to it in 1 second. A disk speed test showed a write and read speed of ~120Mbps so I checked the device manager on my desktop but everything checks out. I checked Seagate Expansion SCSI Disk Device and USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device for updates but Windows found none. Any clue why my desktop would struggle to write to this disk? I am using a USB 3.0 port that has been tested with a 3.0 drive to full duplex speeds.

 

[L&LD]

What specs are the desktop and laptops? What other USB devices are plugged into each? Are you transferring from one USB drive to another?

Are you rebooting the computer, log in, let it idle for 5 minutes and then test it?

 

[PinkFloydEffect]

The desktop has an ASRock A320M-HDV mainboard, and my laptop is a Thinkpad X131e. None of my USB devices are plugged into each other, except for a USB 3.0 hub but the external is not connected to the hub. I am not transferring between USB drives, I am transferring to and from a 10K rpm Velociraptor.

I never let my computer idle for 5min, the OS is so clean and I have a dedicated M2 for the OS with a bandwidth of over 2,000Mbps.

I tested it on my desktop at work along with my work laptop, getting the normal ~120Mbps read and write. I tried the 2.0 ports on my home desktop and got a much better response from the external as well as 30-40Mbps transfer speeds compared to the 3.0 ports. So it must be an issue with my home desktop mainboard or drivers.

 

[L&LD]

Make sure you have a second copy of the data on that external drive. This is how I've seen external HDDs begin to fail (seemingly random glitches mixed with stellar performance).

 

[PinkFloydEffect]

Make sure you have a second copy of the data on that external drive. This is how I've seen external HDDs begin to fail (seemingly random glitches mixed with stellar performance).

Its a consistent drive with 3 out of 4 machines, and the SMART data is young and healthy.

 

[PinkFloydEffect]

I updated my BIOS to the latest version, but still nothing. I am stumped because the same USB 3.1 port functions fine with all other drives both flash and externals. Its just this one particular external that has an extreme write bottleneck, yet works on USB 2.0 ports to full 2.0 write speed along with normal 3.1 write speeds on all other computers.

EDIT:

Alright this was making me restless I ended up taking it apart...this is all there is to it just a cheesy little daughterboard. It has an ST1000LM024 Samsung Momentus drive.

I busted out the Dyno and made a pass pulling and pushing ~120MBps which is consistent with the readings this assembled Seagate drive has connected to other computers. So I am ruling out the drive itself!

 

[PinkFloydEffect]

Moving onto the daughterboard I connected it to a different model drive I pre-tested the speed of in the dock and it presented the same symptoms of the assembled Seagate with a write speed of only 350KBps...BUT connected to any other machine wrote @ 120-140MBps. So the problem is between the daughterboard and my chipsets. It could be a driver glitch but like I said no other USB3 drive of any type has write speed issues with my computer.