Recent Wildly Fluctuating Copy Speeds of Large Files (125+ GB) to External Hard Drives

@johnlgalt

I am feeling a bit better today. Thank you for your good wishes.

I got some bad news yesterday. The 4 TB WD Black has shipped, but the blue plastic drive caddy to mount the drive in the Dell XPS 89xx series of computers is on backorder from another supplier. That means I won't be able to test for at least two or three weeks.

In other news, I have been plagued with mouse issues for the last couple of months, which manifested itself randomly right-clicking and doing all sorts of unintended stuff. The mouse wouldn't accurately select text in messages. It was a high-end Logitech mouse. I replaced the previous Logitech wireless with this new one, thinking that the older one was dying.

I also was using a wireless Logitech MX Keys for Business keyboard. It is such a nice keyboard. They also have a Logi+ Options software app for customizing the keyboard and mouse. Yesterday, I decided that I should replace the mouse with an older wired Microsoft mouse (Comfort). The problem was not resolved.

Today I dug out the original wired Dell keyboard and the original wired Dell Laser Keyboard. I installed them and then used Revo to uninstall the Logi+ Options app. Rebooted and tested. All is well!

I guess that my four-year-old Dell 8930 SE does like the new-fangled wireless keyboards and mice. I was running out of options to solve that problem, but it is now resolved. I will keep the wonderful keyboard and the mouse for my next computer, whenever this one gives up the battle.

Since I will have to copy my backup this week, as I have been doing, I wonder if the copy speeds will stabilize . . . ? That Logi+ Options software might have created a conflict . . .

So, a minor victory in my efforts to master the tech. Have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

Glad you're feeling better!

It's entirely possible, considering the mouse and KB were also connecting via USB to your system.

Guess we will know more after your backups this week.

@johnlgalt

Indeed. I suspected that the Logi+ Options app was a little aggressive. That could explain a lot. We will find out on Friday. The new 4 TB WD Black internal drive arrived this afternoon. Unfortunately, the drive caddy to mount it in my Dell 8930 SE is on backorder, so I will have to wait three weeks or longer for that to arrive.

I will post back after my backup copy to my new 5 TB external WD My Passport Ultra on Friday afternoon.

Thank you again for your continuing advice and for sharing your expertise. Have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

It's odd, though, as I also use high end Logitech mice (I currently have the MX Master 3 as the backup for the backup lol, and the MX Master 3 for business as a backup for my MX Master 3S), and I don't see the slowdowns.

Though, to be fair, I'm connected to USB 3 ports all around, both the Mice (via the Logitech Bolt receiver) as well as the 3 external drives (NVMe in external drive enclosures).

But I also did not enable the Smart Actions part either.

garioch7 said:

Unfortunately, the drive caddy to mount it in my Dell 8930 SE is on backorder, so I will have to wait three weeks or longer for that to arrive.

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Have you check for availability from others sources?

@Winuser

It was ordered online, not from Dell, and has been paid for. Imagine $44.82 for a blue plastic drive caddy, which probably cost a couple of bucks to manufacture. I'm just going to be patient and wait for it to arrive.

Have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

garioch7 said:

@Winuser

It was ordered online, not from Dell, and has been paid for. Imagine $44.82 for a blue plastic drive caddy, which probably cost a couple of bucks to manufacture. I'm just going to be patient and wait for it to arrive.

Have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

Click to expand...

It probably cost less than a dollar to make. Seeing how you paid for it already it could be a pain to cancel. I don't know about you but I hate waiting on back orders. Is there any way you can use Velcro as a temporary mount?

@Winuser

Thank you for your post. I have no Velcro. I would prefer to wait. I want to ensure that the drive is properly mounted before use. It just eliminates another possible source of issues. Besides, they don't exactly give away those 4 TB WD Black gaming drives. I don't want to risk damaging it.

So, as I said, I am content to wait. The drive caddy is supposed to arrive at the online retailer in 7 to 10 business days. This is not an urgent matter, as the overall copy speed times are about the same. I would just like to find out the cause of the copy speed fluctuations and eliminate them, if possible.

Have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

garioch7 said:

@Winuser

Thank you for your post. I have no Velcro. I would prefer to wait. I want to ensure that the drive is properly mounted before use. It just eliminates another possible source of issues. Besides, they don't exactly give away those 4 TB WD Black gaming drives. I don't want to risk damaging it.

So, as I said, I am content to wait. The drive caddy is supposed to arrive at the online retailer in 7 to 10 business days. This is not an urgent matter, as the overall copy speed times are about the same. I would just like to find out the cause of the copy speed fluctuations and eliminate them, if possible.

Have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

Click to expand...

I know this was mention before but is it possible the the wrong transfer speeds are being showed? I think you posted the the transfer time is about the same. I have been transferring large folders from my desktop to my Mini PC wirelessly using Terracopy. My transfer speeds were 5 MB/s or less until I updated to a Wi-Fi 6 card. The speeds jumped to over 20 MB/s. After a Windows update the transfer speeds showed at being around 10 MB/s or less. With the drop in MB/s I didn't physically notice a time difference. I'm now using a program called FastCopy and it's showing the transfer speeds as being back in the 20 MB/s and higher. My transfer speeds from a USB 3.0 drive to another USB 3.0 drive are over 100MB/s on both programs.

Winuser said:

My transfer speeds were 5 MB/s or less until I updated to a Wi-Fi 6 card. The speeds jumped to over 20 MB/s.

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How is it that you are only getting somewhere around 20 MB/s on WiFi 6? Are you far away from the WiFi router / access point? If not, you may want to examine your settings. I was getting 70 MB/s or higher on WiFi 6. I'm now getting about 110 to 120 MB/s on WiFi 6e . That's just slightly better than you will get on a gigabit Ethernet connection.

hsehestedt said:

How is it that you are only getting somewhere around 20 MB/s on WiFi 6? Are you far away from the WiFi router / access point? If not, you may want to examine your settings. I was getting 70 MB/s or higher on WiFi 6. I'm now getting about 110 to 120 MB/s on WiFi 6e . That's just slightly better than you will get on a gigabit Ethernet connection.

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I wouldn't have a clue were to look or what to change. The Wi-Fi router is in the room above my computer. I'm transferring files from a USB 3.0 drive on my desktop to a USB 3.0 drive on my Mini PC. If it's a router setting I'm not sure there is much I can do. It's a Comcast modem, router and VOIP unit.

Winuser said:

I wouldn't have a clue were to look or what to change. The Wi-Fi router is in the room above my computer. I'm transferring files from a USB 3.0 drive on my desktop to a USB 3.0 drive on my Mini PC. If it's a router setting I'm not sure there is much I can do. It's a Comcast modem, router and VOIP unit.

Click to expand...

Ahh yes, having a floor between you and the router is also not ideal, so maybe that is the issue. Compounding that is the fact that the typical antenna pattern favors horizontal connectivity in a sort of toroidal pattern, not as good going vertical. Only reason that I went WiFi 6e anyway is because I tend to transfer huge amounts of data.

hsehestedt said:

the typical antenna pattern favors horizontal connectivity in a sort of toroidal pattern,

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That's one of the things I'm not happy with. The router has no external antennas. The other things are that I had to download the Comcast app to my phone and there are very limited settings I can make. I only upgraded to there modem/router to take advantage of their Wi-Fi 6 offer.

@Winuser

In the past, I had a stable 100 MB/s, plus or minus 10 MB/s, which is a normal fluctuation. The overall copy time of a 140 GB image was about 25 minutes from an internal 7.200 rpm 2 TB Seagate Barracuda drive to a WD My Passport Ultra external drive via USB 3.1.

The overall copy time, since the wild speed fluctuations started, is roughly the same, so I am still averaging about 100 MB/s, but speed is fluctuating constantly from 3.0 MB/s to 220 MB/s. I am just trying to determine the cause and rectify it if I can.

Thank you, and have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

garioch7 said:

@Winuser

In the past, I had a stable 100 MB/s, plus or minus 10 MB/s, which is a normal fluctuation. The overall copy time of a 140 GB image was about 25 minutes from an internal 7.200 rpm 2 TB Seagate Barracuda drive to a WD My Passport Ultra external drive via USB 3.1.

The overall copy time, since the wild speed fluctuations started, is roughly the same, so I am still averaging about 100 MB/s, but speed is fluctuating constantly from 3.0 MB/s to 220 MB/s. I am just trying to determine the cause and rectify it if I can.

Thank you, and have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

Click to expand...

I do hope you find a solution. I was happy with getting 20 MB/s and up until @hsehestedt posted his Wi-Fi transfer speeds. Those speeds are on par with what I get transferring from one USB drive to another. Now I'm always going to wonder if I can increase the transfer speeds.

One note about the transfer speeds: If you are simply using File Explorer to judge the speed, bear in mind that the numbers there are wildly inaccurate at times, at least when you are transferring files locally between drives and most noticeable on rotating media. For example, you may notice a really high transfer speed initially, and then see it drop to near zero. This is because initially the transfer is going to cache. Then, as the cache empties it may seem like it is transferring near nothing, but the drive is actually still transferring what was already sent to cache.

Best way to judge is by transferring a couple of large files (small files have a lot of overhead), and timing how long it takes. From there, just take the total amount of data and divide by number of seconds it took to transfer.

The thing is, though, initially he used to get steady transfer speeds. No fluctuations. The Fluctuations started recently, and he assumed his backup drive was exhibiting signs of failure, so he bought a brand new drive - which exhibited the same fluctuations.

Something, somewhere, was changed in the OS, so that the fluctuations started showing, even though the overall transfer speed and time to transfer was not affected.

Think about copying a huge single file, like DVD .ISO - transfer speeds usually remain fairly constant barring something else making use of the system interrupting the transfer.

Now think about transferring a folder full of files of different file sizes. You'll typically see large files achieve a semi-constant transfer speed, but when it gets to the loads of smaller files, the speed varies quite dramatically.

Garioch always saw the large, single-file transfer type speeds when copying his image backups. Now he is seeing the multi-file transfer speed fluctuations.

What concerned him was that this abruptly started out of nowhere, and occurs on both the original external drive as well as the brand new one, which caused him a bit of concern that his system itself may, in fact, have some sort of issue that it did not have previously.

In all of his testing, though, he could not really find any issue, and as the weeks have gone on and he continues to copy his backups to the external, he's also noticed that the overall speed and time have not drastically changed, even with the drastic changes in the instantaneous speeds while transferring the same types of files as before.

@johnlgalt

Well, no joy. The Logi+ Options software, Logi Mouse, and Logi MX Keys for Business were all uninstalled and replaced with the original wired factory Dell mouse and keyboard. That solved my other problem of a "possessed" over-active" mouse doing its own thing, randomly bringing up right-click menus, inability to select text reliably, pinning programs to my taskbar, etc., ad nauseum. That was all very frustrating, but now the wired Dell mouse is rock solid.

There were still the same speed fluctuations today when I copied my weekly image file to my external WD My Passport Ultra drive. Interestingly, TeraCopy Pro confirmed that the overall transfer time was like it used to be, and the average copy speed was where it should be.

Transfer time: 21:15. Average copy speed: 108 MB/s. File size: 134.9 GB

So, now I wait for the mounting caddy on backorder for my brand new internal 4 TB Western Digital Black gaming drive. Once that gets installed, I will set that as the internal backup drive destination instead of the 2 TB Seagate Barracuda HDD. If the copy speed fluctuations disappear when I copy a backup file from it, then I will surmise that something in the cache or controller chip on the Seagate started misbehaving.

If not, I am out of ideas. I love a good mystery better when it is someone else's computer! Who knows, migrating to 23H1 when it becomes available might resolve the issue as well.

Thank you all for your suggestions and advice. It has been a great welcome to these forums, where I also hope to contribute, not just seek help with my issues.

Have a great weekend.

Regards,
Phil

garioch7 said:

Who knows, migrating to 23H1 when it becomes available might resolve the issue as well.

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I wouldn't count on it, as with Win10 there are no more xxH1 Upgrades. Even some speculation the numbering system of Year, Half and whether 1/first or 2/second will be replaced but who knows. 23H2 should be coming out soon.

@johnlgalt

Well, no joy . . . yet. The drive caddy for the Dell 8930 arrived, but it turned out it was not needed for HDD cages Disk 1 and Disk 2. I wasted a lot of time trying to mount the drive in the caddy and into one of the spare drive cages. The HDD Drive 0 drive cage is vertical, and it does have a caddy, but it is a vertical mount at the front top right of the case. That drive cage is different from the two horizontal cases for HDD1 and HDD2 at the bottom of the chassis. No caddy was needed. I just screwed it in and connected when I finally figured it out. Getting old at 71. Dell instructions are too concise to be useful.

Copy speed fluctuations continued when copying from the new internal 4 TB WD Black to my new external 5 TB My Passport Ultra. I have subsequently turned off "write cache buffer flushing" for both internal HDDs. I have an APC UPS, which will provide about 15 minutes of power before shutting down the computer. I also have a 12 Kw Kohler residential standby generator that kicks in after three seconds when it detects no utility power with enough propane to keep me going for ten days, plus when the tanks are full, so there should be no risk.

I also got 23H2 on the desktop earlier this week, and that made no difference.

The symptoms seem to indicate a data "flushing" origin. I will wait for next week to test that hypothesis. I had also noticed in the past with this desktop that large file copies seemed to make it unstable after they completed, so I would restart the computer between each large file copy operation in the past. That stratagem initially, when this problem surfaced, did not make a difference, and then I forgot about it, but I will try next week with a full cold boot (disconnecting the power and holding the power button for 30 seconds) before initiating a copy to the external hard drive. That has solved many weird issues for me in the past. I have Fast Startup disabled and always have.

The good news is that I did get a speed increase on my Macrium Reflect system image of 300 Gb/s compared to backing up to the new WD Black drive as compared to backing up to the Seagate Barracuda.

I will keep you posted. Have a great weekend.

Regards,
Phil