Omg, was I dissatisfied with my purchase. Then, I realized when I formatted to NTFS I left the allocation unit size at the default 4k setting. Oh, that's really wonderful if you really want to save space, not if you need speed. I'm an idiot, I work in IT, and I should have been smarter.
Reformatted to 64k cluster size, and while I am currently losing about 20gb of space, the speed is significantly better. I see a sustainable 80MB/s at nearly all times, peaking at 120MB/s. At 4k cluster 80MB/s was my max, 20MB/s was average, less was common.
I would be lying if I said I was not tempted to set the cluster size larger. If I did this, I would likely set up a partition with 512k or 1m cluster size. The wasted space would require considerations.
Regardless, I am using cache software to enhance this drives performance. I set a L1 cache of ram at 24gb for this drive, and I'm using a 256gb ssd as L2 cache. My speeds do not reflect the speed gains from using this cache, as cache was not active during testing. Cache also does very little to nothing at all on first read, and only shines in successive reads.
| Hard Drive | 5 TB External Hard Disk Drive (HDD) |
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