Terry Pinnell wrote:


I just want to make sure the 10 year old Windows driver is not adversely
affecting performance. Do you think one other approach would be to see if
I'm getting the rated transfer speed, with a bunch of transfers between
this drive and my internal Samsung HDs?

Hmm - a couple of quick runs showed surprisingly inconsistent results!


Have you tried HDTune ?

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

It's a good way to benchmark a drive, and there should be no
alignment based issues when testing.

If you're testing over USB2, a modern drive should be fast enough,
that the HDTune graph is a flat line (i.e. always limited by
USB2 bus speed). If you're seeing dips in the line, then it could be
a drive issue.

I would try writing the drive from end to end, at least once, before
giving up on it. Once the drive has been written, retest with HDTune
and see if it is smoother. On one of my drives here, it started working
a bit better, after some end to end runs as a "warmup".

Paul