Slow HDD, why?

[ALECUBA]

Hi all,

I have the system in my sig and the WD green 1.5TB is really slow when I open it and try to access any files or folders inside. Meanwhile, the other 1TB slower(RPMs) drive is quicker to respond to opening files/folders. Could my bigger drive be dying? I have used several health checking apps and they all show the drive is healthy. I wonder if my motherboard has SATA handling problems, I don't know if that is even possible. I am not using the full capacity of the drive yet. Any thoughts?

Cheers

 

[Elixer]

So, you are saying that using something like crystaldiskinfo shows drive is OK, but in actual use, it is slow?
Just how slow we talking about, and just how full is the HD?

The green HD is already the slowest RPM drive you can get, there is nothing lower, so, your other HD must be faster, or the same.

 

[ArisVer]

The WD Green disks are green in the way that they power down when not in use. When you try to access the disk after it powers down, it takes a while to respond.

 

[CiPHER]

They do not 'power down' they park their heads, that is a completely different thing. The slightly increased latency will not cause any noticeable performance decrease. It will only increase wear&tear when used in a 24/7 environment. You can tweak the headparking with WDIDLE3.EXE to increase it from 8 seconds to 300 seconds to mitigate this issue.

But that is unrelated to what he is saying. Probably he is using the drive contrary to how it is meant to be used: by having a lot of random seeks either by fragmentation or concurrent access, for example because he is using it as a C: system drive as well as storage. That will cause slowdowns. You should use harddrives only for mass strorage of large files and use SSDs for everything else. That is how it is meant to be used and WD Greens will be very fast in this setup, up to 175MB/s with the latest 1200GB platters. WD Green is by far the best harddrive around.

Please show us benchmarks (CrystalDiskMark) as well as SMART (CrystalDiskInfo) to investigate your issue!

 

[LTC8K6]

Lots of complaints about slow WD Green drives if you google. Several said that they RMA'd the drive and the replacement was fine.

 

[CiPHER]

Well present me with a viable situation and i will comment on it. But most likely they are using the drive contrary to how it should be used - with many random seeks. Even a 15.000rpm drive will only be less than 3 times faster than a WD Green for these workloads. SSDs are 100x to 1000x times faster for these workloads. Hence my advice: use SSDs for random I/O and HDDs for sequential I/O. Problem solved! :awe:

 

[ArisVer]

You are correct. By powering down I meant the head parking feature. But it is related to what he said, quoting "the WD green 1.5TB is really slow when I open it and try to access any files or folders inside".

Personally I use a WD Green (SATA 2) and a WD RE4 (SATA 3), both 1TB connected to SATA 2 ports. Apart from a little lag at first time when accessing the Green disk, both run in similar numbers and I even "feel" that the Green drive is faster.

 

[CiPHER]

Headparking will not cause his problem. By default, the headparking timer is 8 seconds and only the first I/O after 8 seconds of inactivity will cause a slightly higher latency. Nothing to worry about, let alone notice in reality. It can be measured in laboratory benchmarks, though.

 

[tweakboy]

Get a black instead.

 

[LTC8K6]

Well present me with a viable situation and i will comment on it. But most likely they are using the drive contrary to how it should be used - with many random seeks. Even a 15.000rpm drive will only be less than 3 times faster than a WD Green for these workloads. SSDs are 100x to 1000x times faster for these workloads. Hence my advice: use SSDs for random I/O and HDDs for sequential I/O. Problem solved! :awe:

I think the OP should just benchmark the drive and report the results.

If it's truly running slow, then it will show up in the tests.

One of the few things benchmarks are good for... :biggrin:

 

[ALECUBA]

The other drive is a laptop drive so it's a 5400 RPM drive as well. I defragged the drive yesterday. It has about 490GB free at the momment while the 1TB has 94GB free. And I do have 2 SSDs, one for the OS/games and a second one for Flight Simulators exclusively. I guess it is the parking of the heads and having to spin up whenever I access something. This green drive is over 3 yrs old so RMA is not an option. I wasn't as computer savvy then as I am now but I just worry that this drive will die on me and I loose what is in it. Just a precaution I have been meaning to take, that's why I am asking. All my important data is backed up on a 320GB I have out of the computer stored in a room. Buying a drive nowadays is not really an option as I cannot justify it just yet. However, if I were to buy say a 3-4TB drive what would you gents recommend? WD black? Blue, red? another brand?
Here are the results to the benchmarks.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3xmoaub7m41bct/Benchmark.PNG?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/khd09auckry026g/READ.PNG?dl=0

 

[Elixer]

Use http://postimg.org to post images, lots easier than using dropbox.
The graph looks about normal for that drive, and it shows 70MB average, which is about right.
Laptop HDs are meant to power down aggressively to conserve power.

For a new HD, I would get Hitachi, WD (black/red), Toshiba, Seagate.

It is good that you got your important data stored away, lots of people don't do that,
but, keep up on the backups, even with new HDs, you just never know when they will fail. It is also wise to have multiple copies of the most important data.

 

[CiPHER]

Please test with a proper benchmark that tests on the filesystem, rather on the raw device. You can use CrystalDiskMark to test on the filesystem. Your problem almost certainly lies in the filesystem, which is heavily fragmented. CDM will not expose this problem.

But you have given your answer basically already: 1TB of which 94GB free. If you defragment a drive that full, not much will happen. You will need about 30-40% free at least for defragmentation to have the proper effect.

Spindown - which is totally different from headparking - could also cause slowdowns most certainly. You can disable this in the power plan options in Windows. This is not the drive's fault. The drive does not spindown itself. It is Windows that tells the drive to spindown. Blame Windows, not the drive.

So probably your issue is a combination of spindown and fragmentation.

 

[cholley]

the spindle speed is mostly marketing, seek time and throughput are the the important factors to look at

 

[CiPHER]

Well how do you say. But isn't seek time related to rotational speed? :hmm:

So is throughput, however the rotational speed can only squeeze some extra throughput out of existing platter technology. The real innovation is designing higher data densities.

 

[ALECUBA]

Maybe it has been too defragmented. I noticed I had a defragmentation schedule to run every week. I also have ordered Windows to not spin down the drives when I formatted my pc. Should I empty it and run some destruction run from Active KillDisk then reformat it?

here is the CDM result
http://s3.postimg.org/8kren962b/CDM.jpg

 

[CiPHER]

Ouch -- that is some seriously bad scores! This would explain everything. But... such a result would mean fragmentation cannot be the primary cause of your performance issues.

Such a bad score can only be explained by:
- concurrent access, thus your harddrive is being used by something else while it was running
- bad hardware
- something else that causes massive I/O performance degradation

Can i see the SMART output of your disk please, with CrystalDiskInfo?

And can you determine whether the HDD led is flashing when you are NOT running a benchmark? Like, flashing really a lot? In other words: is your drive busy with other things prior to running the benchmark?

 

[LTC8K6]

Looks like PIO mode 1...

 

[CiPHER]

I would expect higher random I/O scores for PIO mode. But it is a possibility. Perhaps because of cable errors, the link would fall back to PIO mode. But again, the random I/O score should be better i think, even for PIO. This is just pathetic...

Probably concurrent access has something to do with it, if not the sole cause.

 

[RecoveryForce]

Could possibly be a firmware issue, too.

 

[ArisVer]

Here are the results to the benchmarks.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3xmoaub7m41bct/Benchmark.PNG?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/khd09auckry026g/READ.PNG?dl=0

here is the CDM result
http://s3.postimg.org/8kren962b/CDM.jpg

These are quite contradicting results.

 

[ALECUBA]

http://postimg.org/image/849atbu6j/

LED is not flashing at all most of the time when the PC is at IDLE. I do have the windows TEMP folders directed to this drive so that I don't use space on my SSD tho.

Ouch -- that is some seriously bad scores! This would explain everything. But... such a result would mean fragmentation cannot be the primary cause of your performance issues.

Such a bad score can only be explained by:
- concurrent access, thus your harddrive is being used by something else while it was running
- bad hardware
- something else that causes massive I/O performance degradation

Can i see the SMART output of your disk please, with CrystalDiskInfo?

And can you determine whether the HDD led is flashing when you are NOT running a benchmark? Like, flashing really a lot? In other words: is your drive busy with other things prior to running the benchmark?

 

[AlienTech]

The graph indicates the drive has errors, do a smart check with crystal disk info and see how many reallocated sectors it has, should be a LOT by the looks of the graph. If the MFT is in those areas, and the reallocated sectors are at the end of the drive the speeds would drop drastically when opening directories. You might have to do a full format using the drive vender's utility to check the drive for errors. This would of course ERASE all data on the drive.

Looking at the smartinfo, it says no reallocated sectors.. Everything else seems normal.. Do a full format with the utility and check.. Not windows format. See what that tells you. There are problems seen in the HD tune graph.. Maybe the drive is not advanced enough to update the smart data correctly, I seen older drives like that.

 

[ALECUBA]

Thanks, I'll get around to saving some of the stuff I need off this drive and give it a format using WD utility. Won't be for a few days tho as I am busying working.

 

[MongGrel]

Greens are slow because they are slow.

Why they sell cheaper, you get what you pay for.

Have had the RE3s in here for they first came out, RE4s are the new ones but not what you're probably looking for. If serious for spending on a WD I'd use a Black, have a couple smaller ones on other systems with a small SSD for the OS.