Windows network shares slow only with external drive

Question

I have two windows (updated) 10 machines connected to my wifi. Both get excellent speeds for both upload and download. Speeds are also good when copying files using the built in windows file sharing, except when the source file is on my external (mechanical) drive connected to PC (a) and I copy files to PC(b). In this specific case, speed drops and the latency seems to be horrible. File listing is super slow for example.

Any idea on where I should begin troubleshooting? The external drive works fine when being directly accessed on pc (a).

Answer 1

If the drive is working fine on the host computer, then I would guess that the only issue is that both USB connected storage and mechanical drives have much slower access times than internal SSD storage.

The speed differences are huge and very noticeable over a network share. This is normal.