My long hours with SanDisk 4TB Extreme Portable SSD NVMe

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I use a 4 years old WD 3TB My Book external USB drive always connected and active 24/7/365 with my Windows 10 laptop.
The drive holds my image/incremental backups, movie/tv collection, music collection (even a full Windows 7 image of my previous laptop).
I also have 8TB WD HDD (disconnected), 5TB WD HDD (attached to a streamer in my home movie system) (Both are backups of the 3TB HDD) and a portable Samsung 512GB T7.

My biggest grip with WD 3TB was the slow internal file copy. I use a temp folder before copying files to their proper folders. Max internal copy speed was about 27MB/s. I do copy very large files.

So, I decided to look for external SSD NVMe 3-4TB to replace the 3TB HDD.
Found a good deal on Amazon for SanDisk 4TB Extreme Portable SSD rev 2 – Up to 1050MB/s – USB-C, USB 3.2 Gen 2 – External Solid State Drive for $439 (
List Price: $699.99). NVMe inside the drive is WD SN520).

Got the drive, connected to my laptop, closed any apps reading/writing to the 3TB drive. Formatted the SSD to NTFS and launched my default copy app, TeraCopy Pro.
Everything seems fine. The HDD had 1.3Tb of data to copy. Copy speed was ~120MB/s (~1Gb/s). Copy should have taken ~3.5 hour.

After about an hour I have checked the progress just to find out the TeraCopy has frozen with no response. Had to kill the process in task manager.

Formatted the SSD again. Started TeraCopy, which never failed me in the past. Checked after an hour, and sure, TeraCopy froze after copying 27% (~370GB).

Decided to give File Explorer a chance. File Explorer started with speed of 17MB !!
Killed it.

So, after more than 2 hour I was at the start.

Launched Q-Dir portable. Selected ALL folders on the 3TB HDD. Right-click paste to the SSD, selected File Explorer (second chance). Copy started at 120MBs and was stable for 3.5 hours.

Set new drive letter for the 3TB HDD and disconnected the drive.
Set old drive letter of the HDD to the new SSD.

Launched apps used with the drive. Everything looked OK.

This morning I got a warning the Acronis could find the backup drive and no incremental backup has been done.

My fault, I should have checked the settings. Made proper setting in Acronis and ran the daily backup which finished fine.

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How do you copy from the temp folder to the actual folder? Move should take seconds, copy will take hours because you need to move the data off the disk and put it back on again.

What speed is the new SSD when you do the internal copy?

cheers, Paul

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Alex5723

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I need to keep the original files in the temp folder for some time before deleting them.
Internal copy on the SSD is ~130MB/s (1Gb/s).

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Correction : The internal NVMe inside the drive is Western Digital SN730E 4000.7.

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Copied files from the new Extreme SSD to Samsung T7 SSD at 2.5Gb/s

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