Review on Crucial 2TB Portable SSD USB by Eric Williamson

I have a Toshiba Canvio (or similar name), its 2TB drive is a bit smaller than my palm print. I've had it for years. I get an average of 125MB reads and writes. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. But 90% of the time, I know I'll be moving my data off my laptop to a 125Mbps server. Last week the drive started acting a bit strange and yesterday I saw an Amazon deal on this drive so I pulled the trigger to talk. Here's my experience: Using the cable that came with me, I was writing to a new drive (from my laptop) at less than 40Mbps. Tried all 3 USB 3.0 ports. It was always less than 40MB. I was going to rewrap the drive but decided to try the USB-C to USB-A cable I had for my phone. As if by magic, the write speed increased to 280 MB. I wasn't thrilled, having read that some people get over 400MB from a USB 3.0 port, but it was twice as fast as the drive I was trying to replace, so I was cautiously hoping. I transferred 100GB of data, the data ranged from 100MB files to dozens of 1-10GB files. It covered about 75% of the transfer path and then suddenly dropped to 40-48Mbps over the next 7 minutes while transferring the rest of the data. Was there a time saving compared to the hard drive I was replacing? May be. again, maybe not really good enough. My last hope was to write the data off the new hard drive to my $7,000 home server. The server features numerous NVME drives, an MSI z490 Godlike motherboard and an i9-10900k processor. It has its own Thunderbolt ports and various other high-speed USB ports. I plugged this drive in, it was recognized immediately and I copied about 30GB from my nvme drive to this drive. I connected to a Thunderbolt port (with cable included) and MAGIC, 800Mbps transmission. about 3 seconds. It then fell to a few hundred, and then hesitated. you guessed 40MB. I'm pretty sure I have ADHD so I stopped the broadcast after watching the paint dry for 60 seconds. In the next test, move the data from this external drive to my server. The speed started at 800 Mbit/s, then dropped to 400 Mbit/s after about 20 seconds and stopped at about 280 Mbit/s after a minute. I was able to get a stable transfer of the remaining data at around 280Mbps. Why is this happening? Well I know that my CPU will slow down when going through an overclock test when it gets too hot. Is this happening? I know I could probably pop that disc into the MRE and it would be up and running in about 3 minutes. I honestly don't care. Other people seem to like their drive. Maybe the mines are defective. What I do know is that the one I received didn't live up to expectations and is back on Amazon.