Since I was backing up that specific drive I took the time to back up other stuff on other drives and have duplicated the problem. The one thing that concerns me still is that some of the drives I was backing up to were quite full as well and while download speeds were a bit slower (~60 MB/s) they were still nothing like the 5 MB/s I was seeing on the drive that was almost full. Maybe the drive that's running slow for transfers is proportionally more full and that makes the difference.

I appreciate your advice.

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I have a bunch of external drives where data is moved around. If optimizing/defragmenting this one is a good idea (depending on your answer), then it probably makes sense to do this with all of them, right?

I appreciate your help with this.

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I should add that when this issue first came up, I tried playing a video and it took forever for VLC to start playing it, and it took a long time to catch up when I scrubbed ahead. That problem hasn't occurred again.

Now that I think of it, it's possible that at the time I was transferring and getting slow speeds (and playing and having issues) that something was running an update or scan in the background and being a resource hog. I didn't check Task Manager to see what was running.

In any event, my biggest worry, that the drive was failing, doesn't seem to be something I need to worry about. All indicators are that the drive is healthy. It is less than a year old and doesn't have a lot of hours on it. Plus, it's 100% backed up.

If the slow transfer speed continues, I'll chalk it up to limited space on the disk and live with it. The next test will be when a new Hookup Hotshot scene is available. That'll be the next time I load anything onto that drive.

But, as I say, my biggest worry, imminent drive failure, doesn't seem to be a problem.

Thanks again! As a non-tech guy, you've been helpful and have given me confidence that I'm not about to lose the drive.

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Hover your cursor over each drive to get the drive letter. Right-click a drive to display a pop-up menu. Select "View details". That will bring up a new window. Select "Error Log" from the gray bar near the top. This will show any errors that your drive has encountered and is probably the most useful screen.

If you click on "Attributes", in that same window, you'll get something that might seem a bit scary at first:

"Scary" being all of the "pre-failures" and "old age" entries under "Type". To be honest, I don't know enough about GSmartControl to comment about these entries. But I do know that this drive is only around 2 years old and hasn't seen all that much use. I am comforted by the Failed column containing only "never" entries.

Yes, you can totally geek out with this tool. But you can also easily use it for a quick check on the health of your hard drive(s).

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