Toshiba N300 10TB drive backs up much slower than a N300 8TB drive

Topic

New Reply

I have used a Toshiba N300 8TB drive for a couple of years to backup my system. I just installed a 10TB version of the drive and noticed much slower operation. Macrium Reflect shows the 8TB drive capable of transferring data at between 1.0 to 1.5 Gb/s for a full backup of about 4.6TB of data. The 10TB drive started out at a maximum of 1.0 Gb/s and dropped to about 300 Mb/s after a couple of hours. It took 27 hours for the 10TB drive to backup and verify the data.

I checked the SMART data and everything looked fine. I ran Crystal Disk Mark on both drives and got about the same results.

I bought another 10TB drive from another source to see if maybe the first drive was faulty. The second drive does the same thing. Any idea why a 10TB drive is so much slower?

I’m running Windows 10 with MR 7.3.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Does the system have USB ports from differing specs (USB 2 vs USB 3)?

--Joe

Reply | Quote

I have SATA based removable drive bays. I use the same bay and thus the same SATA connection for backing up the system. Each drive used the same connection.

Thanks,
Steve

Reply | Quote

Have you checked the RPM (5400, 7200, ?) of the external HDD. Have you checked the SATA version of each HDD’s connection (same connection on computer but different connection on drives)? Either or both may affect the transfer speed.

Reply | Quote

The drives are both 7200rpm and CMR based. Both have the same type of physical SATA connections.

Ok, things have become weird. Turns out the 10TB drive does not like being assigned the drive letter Z. It’s fine with G and W. With G and W the drive starts out faster than the 8TB drive then settles down to the same performance as the 8TB drive. I restarted the system so there was no holdover connection issue with having had the 8TB in the slot.

I never knew drives could be biased against certain drive letters. Any idea why Z is a problem?

Thanks,
Steve

Reply | Quote