I have a USB 3 Seagate drive 6TB. Possibly very similar. And had a little trouble getting it working properly. What I did was :
- plugged it into windows, downloaded a Seagate utility and enabled the drive allowing itself to sleep or spin down. (can't remember why I though or how I knew that it didn't)
- reformatted to ext4. Because at the time the processor use while copying seemed unreasonably high using NTFS.
- plugged it into a powered hub, which is almost certainly what fixed my issues. But I had an SSD plugged in as well.
Been working flawlessly ever since for 2 years.