External HDD Performance

This is not a technical post and it’s not related to the database world. It’s just a short experience I had with external HDDs as a simple user so I wanted to share it.
I have an Transcend external HDD for quit a while now. It’s a 2TB disk and it was very useful with my old laptop (where I only had 160GB SSD drive). Since I got my new laptop with 1TB SSD, I hardly use the external disk anymore, but I do keep backups on it (like a good IT guy). This disk contains a second copy of all of my pictures, some documents and other junk (called me old-fashioned, but I don’t want to backup all of this to the cloud).

Then, last week this disk simply fell on the floor (from about 2 meters).
It seems to be working well since the fall, but obviously, I can’t trust it anymore. So just in case I bought a new disk, this time a 4TB Seagate one. As this is only for backup (and maybe to keep some of my big VMs), I don’t really care about its performance.
The first thing I wanted to do is to copy the stuff from my old drive to the new one. I connected both to my laptop (both are USB3 and were connected to USB3 ports) and started copying about 1.7TB.
Windows showed me it would take more than 1 day and the speed was about 20-30MB/s for larger files and about 7-8MB/s for small ones. I just kept working and didn’t pay attention, but after a couple of hours I realized that it doesn’t seem right. I checked online and got these numbers: USB3 theoretical speed is up to about 600MB/s and my new Seagate disk is about 100MB/s write in benchmarks. So as slow as my Transcend might be, the copy should be faster than what I got.
After a short search on the internet I found this blog post. I followed the steps and it indeed made a difference. After I restarted the computer and copied the data again I got iver 100MB/s for large files and about 20MB/s for small files, so all in all about 3-4 faster than before.
To summarize the solution, Windows 10 disables caching for external disks, so if they get disconnected by accident, no data will be lost. You can enable the cache (but need to be careful when disconnecting the drive) in the “device manager” by going to the external disk under the “Disk Drives” section and change the policy to “Better performance”.