Seagate 3TB Slow Write Speeds, Drive Failing?

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Nirad9er

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Feb 18, 2004
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So I have a Seagate 3TB Drive (ST3000DM001) for less than 2 years that I pulled from an Expansion external USB drive because the USB adaptor went bad (windows wouldn't detect the drive).

I recently upgraded to a 6tb WD blue drive as my main storage / backup drive however (got it for $110 brand new :))
I formatted / cleared the 3TB Seagate to keep as a second backup drive. I noticed when I try to copying large data files to it (ex. Backing up the Battlefield 1 installation cache), the write speed will start out around 100-110MB/s for about 30seconds then it'll drop to like 50MB/s and then like 20-30MB. WTF?

  • I tried swapping SATA cables with no luck.
  • I checked Crystal Disk and it says the health is good.
  • I tried copying the same exact data to another Seagate 2TB drive I have (ST2000DM001) and it copied much faster at like 120MB - 140MB/s so it seems something is up with this 3TB Seagate drive.

Any idea what would be causing the 3TB drive to write so slow?
Is the drive failing?
Is there a special way I should try formatting or do a CHKDSK to fix this issue?

Thanks for your help.
 
So I did a full CHKDSK /r today and found 0 bad sectors.

I tried some different large files (>8gb) and the write speed was like 150MB sustained and did not drop in speed.

I can't figure out why it was struggling with copying over the .cab files from the Battlefield 1 install while my 2tb Seagate did fine with that.

Does anyone have any experience with low write speeds on specific files types? Does that even make sense?

Anyway looks like my drive is OK but this behavior is weird with certain files.
 
This sounds like a SMR drive but 3TBs should not be SMR (at least I have not heard of 3TB SMR drives before).

Although with that said drives from externals don't necessarily have to be the same drive as an internal drive. Maybe it really is a 2 platter SMR drive.
 
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Look at SMART data. That model of drive is very prone to failures. I have had 8 of them go bad on me.
 
A Google search of that part number shows some real interesting comments about this drives performance and durability. I would zero the entire drive then reformat it while plugged in through SATA and test performance again.

Use this and do a 1 pass of zeroes then reformat it with default allocation size and NTFS file system, then test again.

http://www.killdisk.com/screen.htm#win
 
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Hello,

I believe this much of speed is extremely low. You can disable access from anti-malware and performance monitoring tool and then check again. Hope the speed improves
 
I had the same drive go out on me a few days ago, said "warning" on crystal info so i knew it was coming sooner or later. Drive was warranty replacement of the original which lasted about 18 months and this one was around the same time when it died. I just noticed some major slowdowns and when i rebooted the drive wasn't even listed at all in Windows 10. Looking for another SSD now i'm done with spinners.
 
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