Hard drive on Seagate Barracuda 2TB is behaving oddly
Hard drive on Seagate Barracuda 2TB is behaving oddly
I recently added the Seagate Barracuda 2tb to my PC and am having trouble downloading Rainbow 6 Siege on Steam. The download speed fluctuates, starting around 90mbps, then dropping to zero before briefly increasing to 10-20mbps and returning to zero. When paused and resumed, the cycle repeats. My NVMe drive consistently delivers 100mbps for game downloads on Battle.net (not used much on Steam). Anyone have any suggestions?
That sounds pretty expected. Seagate Barracuda drives are SMR and have very poor write performance to them, even worse random reads like you'd get when installing games, so your limited by how fast the HDD can write the game to it. This behavior is not out of the ordinary for these sorts of drives.
Moving games from your NVMe drive to the hard drive would likely cause a performance drop, similar to the original issue.
It should generally match the original pace or run a bit more slowly overall, as you must still get the game downloaded.
It could be that some sectors are waiting and the HDD could be stuck there too. To make sure you should check your HDD health with Crystaldiskinfo. You can see if your drive is totally fine or has a warning. Even if it's long in use, you could have a not so good sample from the factory. In general Seagate Barracuda are good and long lasting drives.
It's always good to verify smart data on a Seagate Barracuda. This isn't the first time the drive has quietly started failing.