Question External HDD write speed issues

[Mitsimponas]

Hi everyone. Today I bought the Toshiba Canvio Basics 2022 USB 3.2 2TB and used it on my laptop running Linux Mint 21.2.

At first, transferring files (around 180GB at once) was fine with speeds around 150 MB/s. However, when I started transferring music (another 180GB), the speed dropped significantly to below 10 MB/s. I stopped the process as it wouldn’t finish any time soon, which caused some problems ejecting the drive.

I then plugged it into a Windows 11 machine and used Diskpart to format the drive. After that, Linux recognized the drive, and the first batch of files I transferred moved very quickly. But after a few transfers, the same issue occurred, with speeds dropping to around 5 MB/s, requiring about 20 hours to finish the process. When I tried transferring files on Windows 11 (without reformating it), the speed was below 1 MB/s.

Do you have any suggestions regarding my problem? Thanks!

 

[kanewolf]

Hi everyone. Today I bought the Toshiba Canvio Basics 2022 USB 3.2 2TB and used it on my laptop running Linux Mint 21.2.

At first, transferring files (around 180GB at once) was fine with speeds around 150 MB/s. However, when I started transferring music (another 180GB), the speed dropped significantly to below 10 MB/s. I stopped the process as it wouldn’t finish any time soon, which caused some problems ejecting the drive.

I then plugged it into a Windows 11 machine and used Diskpart to format the drive. After that, Linux recognized the drive, and the first batch of files I transferred moved very quickly. But after a few transfers, the same issue occurred, with speeds dropping to around 5 MB/s, requiring about 20 hours to finish the process. When I tried transferring files on Windows 11 (without reformating it), the speed was below 1 MB/s.

Do you have any suggestions regarding my problem? Thanks!

Thousands of small files is very inefficient. You might do better to make a zero compression ZIP file and then copy that to your external. Then you have one large file instead of 1000s of small files.

 

[Mitsimponas]

Thanks for the reply. I'll give it a try. In the meantime, so do you think those numbers were normal? On Windows 11, I transferred a 5GB folder of music from another external HDD (Toshiba Canvio Basics 2018) and the speed was 75-77 MB/s. However, when I tried to transfer to the new HDD mentioned before, the speed went down to 350 KB/s or even worse.

 

[Grobe]

Also, that HDD may very well be an SMR drive, that is prone to bad write performance.

Web search loosely support this:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/are-toshiba-canvio-basics-2022-_CxH89ioTAeLaN1JX9lCuw

 

[Mitsimponas]

Thousands of small files is very inefficient. You might do better to make a zero compression ZIP file and then copy that to your external. Then you have one large file instead of 1000s of small files.

I tried it, and while 1.5GB of music was transferred very quickly, the zip file won't completely unzip inside the external HDD.

However, even if it does unzip, I'm not sure if I should rely on zipping the files, as I didn't have to do it with Toshiba Canvio Basics 2018.

 

[kanewolf]

I tried it, and while 1.5GB of music was transferred very quickly, the zip file won't completely unzip inside the external HDD.

However, even if it does unzip, I'm not sure if I should rely on zipping the files, as I didn't have to do it with Toshiba Canvio Basics 2018.

If the purpose of this disk is backup or bulk transfer then zipping thousands of files is a perfectly legitimate step.

 

[Mitsimponas]

If the purpose of this disk is backup or bulk transfer then zipping thousands of files is a perfectly legitimate step.

Yeah, what I mean is that I don't know why it's happening on the newer model, while I didn't have such issues with the previous one. One could argue that it's just worse, but I was just expecting similar quality.

So from my description it doesn't seem to be a faulty product, right?

PS: Any idea why it won't unzip?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

As stated slightly up thread. This is very likely an SMR drive. You've got what you got.

 

[Mitsimponas]

As stated slightly up thread. This is very likely an SMR drive. You've got what you got.

Got it. But does this explain, why transferring the same files as I did initially gives me different speeds?

 

[USAFRet]

Got it. But does this explain, why transferring the same files as I did initially gives me different speeds?

Different drive technologies can give vastly different speeds.

Doing things like this, SMR is slooooow.

 

[Mitsimponas]

Different drive technologies can give vastly different speeds.

Doing things like this, SMR is slooooow.

Yeah, I understand this. But why did transferring some files on an empty drive gave me ~150 MB/s, and after formatting it again and transferring the same files, the speed dropped to below 10 MB/s?

Also, what is the best way to use such drive? Just zipping the files if they're too many and store them as zip files, unzipping them only after transferring them back to an internal drive?

 

[USAFRet]

Also, what is the best way to use such drive? Just zipping the files if they're too many and store them as zip files, unzipping them only after transferring them back to an internal drive?

That all depends on what you're using it for.

But why did transferring some files on an empty drive gave me ~150 MB/s, and after formatting it again and transferring the same files, the speed dropped to below 10 MB/s?

Was that 150 vs 10 throughout the whole process?
A single glimpse might have shown it as 150MB/s, while a look at a different tmie slice may have shown 10MB/s.

 

[Mitsimponas]

That all depends on what you're using it for.


Was that 150 vs 10 throughout the whole process?
A single glimpse might have shown it as 150MB/s, while a look at a different tmie slice may have shown 10MB/s.

I wanted to use it in the same way I've been using the 2018 model I mentioned above., which is transferring files like movies, mp3/flac files, Unity/Unreal projects etc, relatively (but not unbearably) slowly, and being able to access them in a similar manner. If the 2018 model is not SMR, then that's on me for making the wrong choice (though I don't see how could have known, but this is not the place to complain about this).

Yes, it was very close to 150MB/s because the process took less that 30 mins, while on the second attempt, the estimation was many hours. Of course I can't be sure if it would increase, but I'd been waiting quite a bit already.

 

[Mitsimponas]

I formatted the drive and transferred 180GB of movies. The speed was again ~150MB/s. However, when I started transferring 180GB of music, the speed decreased to ~25 MB/s, which is slow but acceptable.

After that, I transferred some TV series, and speed was ~125 MB/s. Now I'm transferring some retro games (407 files/60GB) and it started at ~125 MB/s but ended up at 8 MB/s and is still decreasing over time.

So my follow up question is what is the best way to use SMR drives? As mentioned above, is it the number of files that mostly matter? What should I avoid doing?

i.e. Yesterday I tried to transfers only 10GB of Unity projects and it was unbearably slow.

 

[USAFRet]

180GB of movies, at 4GB each will transfer a lot faster than 180GB of music, at 4MB each.

So my follow up question is what is the best way to use SMR drives?

Just let it run.
It is what it is.

 

[Mitsimponas]

180GB of movies, at 4GB each will transfer a lot faster than 180GB of music, at 4MB each.


Just let it run.
It is what it is.

Fair enough. Thanks a lot!