[SOLVED] New HDD with varying proformance

[Nitrox8760]

Hey All,
I just received a new Seagate HDD for Christmas, which I was planning to use for game archiving. I formatted the drive and then tried transferring all my steam games over to it, performance seemed good to begin with, speeds were >100MB/s, however after a few games had been transferred (around 340GB) performance has plummeted and it now is below 1MB/s most of the time. I have tried the usual things, including reformatting it, uninstalling it, changing the SATA port, as well as some other things, such as checking SATA controller mode (it was AHCI) and turning off windows indexing. But still, the drive will no longer peak a couple of MB/s.
The drive is brand new. I had heard that Seagate swapped to selling shingled drives however I don't believe these speeds are reasonable even for that. Could you guys suggest any other possible fixes, or is the drive just defective?
I may also note that the drive did report failed ECC error rate when performing a SMART test, although other posts seemed to suggest that this was not a significant issue.
Many thanks

 

[SkyNetRising]

SMR drive. Inconsistent performance is normal for these.
When you write a lot of data to it, it has to correct neighboring tracks for every write.
This is done in background and slows down your drive.

 

[Nitrox8760]

SMR drive. Inconsistent performance is normal for these.
When you write a lot of data to it, it has to correct neighboring tracks for every write.
This is done in background and slows down your drive.

That makes sense. Does that mean if I wait a bit of time for it to correct, the speed will go back up? I will only be writing to this drive occasionally anyway and moving my current steam games will be the only time it will ever be used so much at once.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Does that mean if I wait a bit of time for it to correct, the speed will go back up?

Yes. It should normalize after all tracks, that need corrections, have been fixed.