Seagate Expansion Desktop performance issues and fixes

I had some issues with a brand new Seagate Expansion Desktop 4TB USB 3 hard drive (STEB4000200). Here are the issues and how they were fixed.

I unboxed the drive and connected it to a Windows 10 computer's USB 3 port. The drive appeared to operate very slowly right from the beginning. Even a quick format to NTFS that should complete within some seconds lasted for ages and had to be interrupted.

Windows event log had logged messages that the device could not be migrated.

Device SCSI\Disk&Ven_Seagate&Prod_Expansion_Desk\000000 could not be migrated.

When connecting all my other USB hard disk drives event log logged a successful migration.

Device ... was migrated.

After some googling I interpeted the “could not be migrated” message so that there is some connectivity issue between the computer and the drive and so the connection operates on a very low speed, perhaps at USB 1 speed.

I tested all the USB ports on my computer, installed pending Windows updates, rebooted the computer, removed and reconnected all the cables including the USB 3 cable between the computer and the drive. There was no firmware updates available for the drive. The issue was finally cleared and Windows event log now shows

Device SCSI\Disk&Ven_Seagate&Prod_Expansion_Desk\000000 was migrated.

I don't know what caused the issue and why it was cleared. I haven't seen this issue ever since.

When copying data to the drive with Windows 10 via USB 3 connection the drive first works and performs as expected. At some point, typically after writing about 12 gigabytes (which appears to match to the amount of free RAM on my computer), the write speed drops close to zero and appears not to recover from that.hard drive

All my other USB hard drives of Seagate and other brands work well. For example a brand new Seagate Expansion Portable 2TB hard drive that also has USB 3 connection works fine.

The issue was fixed by mounting the drive as a removable medium instead of a regular drive. I found this fix by testing just about everything.

Here are the instructions how to mount the drive as removable medium:

• Plain Windows 10: Go to Control panel → Device Manager → Disk drives. Right-click on the drive and select Properties. Make sure that optimize for quick removal is selected and write caching is disabled. See https://www.easeus.com/backup-recovery/windows-10-thinks-my-hard-drive-is-removable.html for more info but do the opposite.
• TrueCrypt: When mounting the drive select Mount options and tick Mount volume as removable medium. See https://andryou.com/truecrypt/docs/volume-mounted-as-removable-medium.php for more info.
• VeraCrypt: When mounting the drive select Mount options and tick Mount volume as removable medium.Se https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Removable%20Medium%20Volume.html for more info.