[Professional]

In the past, I’ve owned at least 30 computers, what you describe is a defective hard drive.

[Angelino97]

But my old Win 7 system was able to instantly count all the files on the HDD. Only the new Win 11 system was struggling.

And both new HDDs have the same issue. Slow with Win 11, fast with Win 7. Are they both defective?

[TexasGator]

“In the past, I’ve owned at least 30 computers, what you describe is a defective hard drive.”

Nope. Most likely he did a fast format as a full format over USB takes a VERY long time. The file transfers are slowed down due to the need to do formatting on the fly as a result of the very large data dump.