WD 8TB so much slower than other drives

[thewul]

Q: Does anybody here have a clue as to why one external USB drive (8TB) is so much slower (all the time) compared to other (WD) external drives? (12TB, 6TB, 4TB and even an old 3TB)

It has always been the case.
Different cables, different ports, no differences.

Thanks.

[riyan_shaik]

Hi @thewul
Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:

Western Digital Support | Western Digital

[thewul]

Frankly, no I did not. Reason being that this drive is out of warranty. It is just striking that I have 5 WD USB drives, also old ones. This one being usd 3.2 is soo much slower than the others, hence I was wondering whether others are/were facing something similar?

[mctalks]

One thing you might check if you haven’t already. Go to Device Manager/Disk Drives and right click on the slower drive and select properties. Go to policies and make sure " Better Performance " is selected and not " Quick Removal." Of course, you then need to be sure that you always eject ( Safely Remove ) your drive via Windows and not just pull the USB cable out. My apologies if you know all of this already.

[thewul]

Tried that as well, but it hardly made any difference to be honest. I checked out the formatting. The slow drive, “Advanced Format supported”: 512 emulation (512e)
The normal performing drives: 4K Native (4Kn)

Regretfully I do not have sufficient free space to move around some 7TB so I could reformat the slow drive just to see whether it makes any difference.

BUT…
whilst having tried 3 different ports front side of my PC all resulting into the same performance, I just connected the drive to a port on the back of the pc using an USB extension cable and it performed well.

Beats me …!

Matter solved. Weird as it may be.

LATER
(nov. 05, 2024)

Regretfully it appeared -not- to have been solved. So, at times, I went on searching for a solution and found it.
I needed to change the so-called ‘cluster size’ (in my case from 8 to 64)