Question Deleting folder at 25 items per second (very slow)

[bricks123]

Yesterday when i deleted a 120 GB folder with 120 000 items from my One Touch Seagate 8TB external harddisk (connected to USB 3.0 port), it could only delete the items in the folder at 25-45 items per second for some reason. It took 1 hour and 20 minutes to delete that folder. The harddisk sounded like it was under 100% load during that time, like the head would seek back and forth for every single file deleted (it sounded like stable buzzing, it was not unusually loud or anything). When renaming a folder, it would also freeze for 2 seconds and do that busy buzzing sound.

The weird thing is, the next day everything went back to normal. I copied back the same exact folder i deleted so that i could delete it again to test it, and then it could delete it at 1000 items per second (it took 2 minutes to delete that folder this time), and the harddisk isn't making that busy buzzing sound anymore (except when copying many small files, but i think that's normal?).

The drive was bought 2 months ago and is used for backup. According to CrystalDiskInfo, the drive is healthy.

Should i be worried that the harddisk is faulty, or was it Windows 10 that caused the harddisk to slow down? Maybe indexing and windows defender was the cause?
I have warranty on the drive, but i can't even reproduce what happened, so i don't know if i can return it.

 

[punkncat]

The drive had previously been hooked up, it's 'driver' installed and ready to use?
By backup, do you mean you're doing physical backups to the drive or another program or OS is backing up to the drive?

 

[bricks123]

The drivers have already been installed since a couple of months ago, and i have already filled up half of its disk space without any problems.

I suspect it might relate to cache? Deleting that folder was the first thing i did after i plugged in the drive. When i deleted the folder for a second time, the cache might have already been filled up (the PC remain powered on between the two tries).

 

[bricks123]

I should probably add that my motherboard and CPU is from 2014, and i am running Windows 10 LTSC 21H2.