I just got myself a new WD Elements Desktop 6TB drive for backups. So I started copying 1TB of data to it. In general, speed remains stable around 130 - 50 MB/s (depends if it’s copying large files or lots of smaller ones).
However, I noticed that sometimes speed suddenly drops to 0 and resumes after 2-5 seconds. Hard Disk Sentinel shows performance issues and increasing “Ultra ATA CRC Error Count” at those moments when speed drops to 0, and Windows Event Viewer also shows warnings about copy retry operations.
I tried to attach it to another USB 3 port and it seemed to make the errors less frequent but I’m not sure.
Is this behavior normal for USB 3 external drives or WD Elements? Or was it only because the constant stream of 1TB of my data is a bit too much and it will work fine later for incremental backups? Or is t
he supplied USB 3 cable not good and I should find a better one?
Or is there something wrong with my USB 3 ports or drivers? I have Gigabyte GA-H270M-D3H motherboard.
