Windows – Reducing Disk-Access Timeout in Windows (Especially for Removable Media)

There are many things that could be going wrong with your drive. From simple head faults to overheating motor or even overheating or dying controller chips.

To me your fault sounds a lot like the either the controller or motor is failing in some way.

Integrated circuits, such as the controller that takes magnetically read data from the head mechanism and converts it to the electrical data your computer expects, are very delicate and with age and use can wear out the same as mechanical components wear out. Either it got hot too many times, has a small imperfection that didn't affect it to begin with but time hasn't done it any good, or it's simply old.

When electronic parts get old they fail in surprisingly similar ways to mechanical parts. Sometimes they "kinda" work and you can get them to move data, but in a slow and painful way as it has a lot of error correcting logic that is having to kick in to do anything. When they're in that state extra heat can make the chip get into an illegal state and require a power cycle (just like your computer processor) or if you are lucky it may soft-boot itself without the OS knowing.

Similarly the drive motor failing may cause somewhat similar problems to what you are experiencing. The motor tries to spin up on boot up, but because the bearing or something is going then it either draws too much power causing a heavy load on the power regulators and controller and making them overheat and effectively "reboot" again or it simply takes too long to spin up causing the controller to think it has a fault and to "let it rest" a moment before trying again.

Linux may simply be more resilient about dealing with failing hardware. There are different ideologies behind the operating systems and how Linux interacts with the hardware could well make it more tolerant of hardware that is spewing errors at it while Windows expects the hardware to just do its job.

Lastly:

Why does [insert drive error here] seem to deteriorate over time / useage

The same can be asked of any piece of equipment in the world, be it cars, trains, microchips or even biological organisms and the answer would always be along the lines of "because everything experiences some kind of deterioration over time."

We can't make frictionless bearings for motors, we can't make make a microprocessor that doesn't waste energy as heat and we can't make cells that live forever. The work that these items do costs them a tiny fraction of their lifespan a lot of the time it's just a guessing game as to which part in any given item will die first.

USB flash drives show up as removable media because they are made using flash RAM, so it's like a memory card rather than a actual drive. A hard drive on the other hand, is well, a hard drive, not flash RAM (SSD's are also just like flash drives for the most part), therefore for the computer to recognize the mass storage unit you connected to it, it requires a drive letter, even if via USB, since to the computer unless you are attempting to install a OS on the drive, will see it as a normal hard drive.