Seagate Expansion 3TB

[synce]

Up until now I've been a WD guy but a week ago another Elements started failing on me so I jumped ship. The Expansion had terrible ratings but at $140 I couldn't resist the specs. Today it arrived and I'm copying over all my files but from time to time it will go from 30-40MB/s write to a slow 256KB/s (using teracopy). It's not a HUGE problem (yet) since the speed usually picks back up after the file finishes copying but I see no reason it should be slowing down like that to begin with. Aside from the files being copied, nothing is being read from or written to either external.

Just fyi right now I'm copying my smallest files only - thousands of RARs compressed to 10-100MB each. I ran all of Seagate's tests and it passed each one. The other drive is a few months old Elements with perfect SMART data, so I'm at a loss here. Has anyone experienced such a thing? Is this simply Seagate quality?

BTW this thing's running at a scorching 61C right now. I've been through almost 20 drives and I don't think I've ever seen one go past 50C :/

 

[aicom]

Might be the USB to SATA controller built in to the drive. That said, USB tends to be fickle like that when transferring tons of data (the protocol wasn't designed for that originally). For a better transfer speed, I'd use eSATA, FireWire, or Thunderbolt (coming soon to a Z77 board near you )

 

[synce]

Thanks for the suggestions. Upon further use lots of bad sectors have sprouted up. I usually don't see those with WD drives until after the first year, not the first day Luckily Amazon offers a refund

It's worth noting that I had a similar problem with an Elements the other week, except it would slow down when reading files instead of writing. Again it was bad sectors. So next time I see sudden slowdowns I'll know exactly what's around the corner.