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Terrible WD Green performance, are they so bad?

KiralyCraft
Go to solution Solved by NumLock21,

Drive has to be formatted at 4K. Not at 4K, then run the 4K alignment tool from WD. Have plenty of WD Green drives and they're faster or close to my WD Black. Coulld be your Linux OS, try the same thing with Windows if it's possible. I think Vista and newer OS don't need the 4K alignment tool, it does it automatically.

Hi there, I recently got a WD20EZRX (2 TB WD Green, 64MB cache) for an incredible 50$ and was happy that I could use it in my torrent server. Then, disappointment. Here's my specs:
- E6850 - Intel Core 2 Duo @3GHz (socket 775!)

- 2 GB of 800 MHz memory (I forgot the brand, whoops)

- ASUS P5GC-MX/1333 motherboard with IDE and 4 Sata 3gbps connectors

- An old 40 GB IDE HDD as boot drive (kind of fast!)

- 500 mbps internet connection 

- And finally, the WD20EZRX .

 

My problem is that I'm barely hitting 2-3 MB/s download speed with torrents, on the respective WD Green drive.

My desktop hits the maximum of 60 MB/s on the same torrents, so connection speed is not the problem. 

 

I know the CPU is old, I know the RAM is old as well, but that doesn't explain that poor performance.

 

When I set the RAM cache to 1.5 GB (so part of the torrent gets first downloaded into memory), i get a whooping 40 MB/s speed (on LAN it goes to gigabit speeds, as told by some LAN benchmarks such as iperf3) which is acceptable (rather than 2-3..). But as soon as the data has to be written to the drive, speed falls down.

 

I disabled IntelliPark, hoping for the best, but no change. Read benches report a 90 MB/s speed, what is going on then?!

Edited by KiralyCraft
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@Captain_WD

 

Your turn....

 

EDIT: Your file server requires a lot of random read / writes of smal files. The WD Green are not designed at all for this workload.

An SSD would be perfect.

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Write benchmark?

No write benchmarks yet, will do soon

 

 

EDIT: Your file server requires a lot of random read / writes of smal files. The WD Green are not designed at all for this workload.

An SSD would be perfect.

 

Wouldn't torrenting to an SSD simply kill it's life? Moreover, caching basically allows writing larger files when the cache fills, right? That's why I enabled the 1.5GB cache in the first place

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WD Greens are designed to run quiet and cool, but do that by running very slow. 

They are advertised at 5300RPM drives I think, while most other drives are advertised at 7200RPM. Not sure what that means the MB/s is, so still not sure if this is how the drive would normally perform, or if your drive is bad.

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WD Greens are designed to run quiet and cool, but do that by running very slow. 

They are advertised at 5300RPM drives I think, while most other drives are advertised at 7200RPM. Not sure what that means the MB/s is, so still not sure if this is how the drive would normally perform, or if your drive is bad. 

I'll test it with a WD Black, to eliminate the possible HDD bottleneck, leaving the machine itself at max performance, and I'll also try the Green in my desktop, aswell hoping for the best

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Please do a bechmark with HD tune 

also post some smart data from hdd sentinel or from somewhere

 

also what bitorrent client are you using ?

Is the drive full or haves data on it ?

 

Ram and CPU are good,I have same config and on my old hdds I'm hiting 40MB/s on qbitorrent and on the performance drive even 75MB/s

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WD Greens are designed to run quiet and cool, but do that by running very slow. 

They are advertised at 5300RPM drives I think, while most other drives are advertised at 7200RPM. Not sure what that means the MB/s is, so still not sure if this is how the drive would normally perform, or if your drive is bad.

It should perform with more speed than that 

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Please do a bechmark with HD tune 

also post some smart data from hdd sentinel or from somewhere

 

also what bitorrent client are you using ?

Is the drive full or haves data on it ?

 

Ram and CPU are good,I have same config and on my old hdds I'm hiting 40MB/s on qbitorrent and on the performance drive even 75MB/s

I can't use HD Tune since I'm on linux, I'm using the latest uTorrent Server, for "Ubuntu 12.04" (no version code, just March 25, 2014, release date)

The drive's empty, NTFS formatted, 4096 bytes physical sector size, 512 logical size

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Short answer? Yes.

 

Elaborated: I've had a couple of them and I will never in a million years spend money on them ever again.

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Short answer? Yes.

 

Elaborated: I've had a couple of them and I will never in a million years spend money on them ever again.

Never will I again, I'll test with a WD Black instead, for the sake of knowledge, and if it proves to be faster, I'll never buy WD Greens for daily use again, just for storage.

 

get WD blues or Seagate hybrid should fix

I got the green because 50$ for 2 TB was insane, but never will again

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I got the green because 50$ for 2 TB was insane, but never will again

 

Seagate Hybrid its supa dupa fast and simple to use

potato.

 
 

 

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Drive has to be formatted at 4K. Not at 4K, then run the 4K alignment tool from WD. Have plenty of WD Green drives and they're faster or close to my WD Black. Coulld be your Linux OS, try the same thing with Windows if it's possible. I think Vista and newer OS don't need the 4K alignment tool, it does it automatically.

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Drive has to be formatted at 4K. Not at 4K, then run the 4K alignment tool from WD. Have plenty of WD Green drives and they're faster or close to my WD Black. Coulld be your Linux OS, try the same thing with Windows if it's possible. I think Vista and newer OS don't need the 4K alignment tool, it does it automatically.

As far as I understood, the "Advanced Format" as WD advertises it, is replacing the 512 byte sector size with a 4kb one, but some site said that it's 4KB on the physical platter, while it is reported to the OS as 8 512-byte sectors. Am I wrong? Should I actually format with a 4K sector size?

 

UPDATE: I wrote a file sharing utility some time ago, in Java, it doesn't cache, it writes directly to the drive. Writing to it dirrectly reports a 3 MB/s speed, while writing to the old IDE 40 GB 7200 RPM 2 MB cache drive is 45 MB/s! The WD is surely to blame

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Never will I again, I'll test with a WD Black instead, for the sake of knowledge, and if it proves to be faster, I'll never buy WD Greens for daily use again, just for storage.

 

I got the green because 50$ for 2 TB was insane, but never will again

 

My luck has been much better with WD Blacks. :) Personally I run RE4-GP's now, but that's really just because they were what I could obtain the cheapest during the HDD crisis a few years back.

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As far as I understood, the "Advanced Format" as WD advertises it, is replacing the 512 byte sector size with a 4kb one, but some site said that it's 4KB on the physical platter, while it is reported to the OS as 8 512-byte sectors. Am I wrong? Should I actually format with a 4K sector size?

 

UPDATE: I wrote a file sharing utility some time ago, in Java, it doesn't cache, it writes directly to the drive. Writing to it dirrectly reports a 3 MB/s speed, while writing to the old IDE 40 GB 7200 RPM 2 MB cache drive is 45 MB/s! The WD is surely to blame

Drive needs to be formatted at 4K. Update motherboard bios, update chipset driver.

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Greens arent bad, i get around 50-80mb/s write on them, im pretty sure something is configured wrong on your setup. But the HDD itself isnt the problem

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I have a pair of WD greens right now, and get ~50-60 mbps writes. Something is seems wrong in your configuration. 

 

Greens are not the fastest, but they should be quite a bit faster than that. 

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The Green drives are best when they are used for sequential workflows, like backup drives or reading large files (such as media playback). Unfortunately, you are going to see slow performance in random workloads unless you have a hybrid drive or an SSD.

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All In all, I tested the WD Green in my Windows machine and with a 1.5 GB cache it decently hit 50 MB/s, after I formatted the drive to 4KB sector size. On my Linux machine, however, it now goes all the way to 20 MB/s, which is decent for the hardware. WD Greens are indeed bad for random read/writes, but that's it for this drive. 

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If you have linux is best to format them native linux ext4,NTFS isn't optimised for linux 

also raising the sector size can help in speed depending of how big are the files are you writing 

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