Back last June I bought myself and my dad new computers. We upgraded from our 9 year old Windows 7 PCs to "shiny new Windows 11" pre-builts. We both are data hoarders and have several external hard-drives we use, mostly for storing media files. These are all USB 3.0 HDDs (Mostly Western Digital, some Seagate) and we both have noticed a considerable drop in transfer rate on our new PCs versus our old ones. Where it used to take less than a minute to transfer 1GB of data, now it takes several minutes on some of the older drives. They also seem to be very inconsistent with how often they stay spun up, sometimes they will remain active for hours, while others they will need to spin up after only 10 minutes inactivity. Keep in mind these are all just media drives, the only program that ever accesses them on it's own is our Emby streaming software, but only when we actively stream of course.
I even noticed my old internal secondary HDD I moved from my Windows 7 to my Windows 11 PC is way slower, I used it to store games, and while I do understand HDD is way slower than SSD, I used to play games fine on Windows 7, but now with a beefier gaming rig, games run slower and the only bottleneck is that HDD (which is connected internally via eSATA).
I'm very confused by why Windows 11 just really doesn't play nice with physical data storage solutions compared to older outdated versions? Any insight on this, or better yet, possible solutions I'm missing?