[peanut]

I have a lot of external USB 3.0 mechanical drives (probably around a dozen of them) and a few external SSDs, all mainly for storage. I'm a bit of hoarder.

I agree with you, what used to be the normal they are now a real chore to use.

My last PC had only SSDs and mechanical drives. I used to download to the mechanic drives as they were bigger in capacity obviously (costs) but my download speeds were affected, it just seesawed with buffering and never quite reached it's maximum speed before dropping off to the buffer. So it can affect download speeds in general. Some cheap SSDs can also have this effect too. (It could also be drivers etc too that affect speeds).