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.