HDD is really slow and can't find out why

[Unknowniti]

Hello everyone,

I bought a used 2.5 inch 1TB Westerndigital HDD and want to use it to store some files. Those files aren't really important, so it would be sad to loose them, but it wouldn't hurt. I use the drive in an external enclosure with usb c 3.2 Gen 1. which shouldn't be the problem because others drives are working fine.

At first I thought the drive is good, but now that I loaded some things onto it the drive is so slow that I can't even play a 1080p mp4 file without some stuttering or buffering when I skip forward.

BlackMagic Disk Speed on my mac shows that the drive write with 80+ MB and reads with 70+ MB on the first run, but then drops to almost 0 on the second.

 

With my little knowledge I opened CrystalDiskInfo (8.12.0) and looked at the S.M.A.R.T infos. For me these numbers look like they are fine and it even says "Good" at the top for drive G:.

So what could it be that the drive is so slow? 

[WhitetailAni]

I don't see any out-of-the-ordinary numbers - Read Error Rate is 0, Reallocated Sector Count is 0, Seek Error Rate is 0, etc. - so all the ones that would cause an HDD to die are fine. The ones that do have values are ones that should - so Power On Hours, Power Cycle Count, Temperature, etc.

 

However, the stuttering you're describing is not normal. I'm able to play 1080p60 video from a 5400 RPM 80GB HDD, with an 8MB cache, with no stuttering.

So here's a few theories:

1. The SATA to USB-C adapter is causing input/output lag

2. The drive has a fault

3. The HDD is really that slow

 

Can you run CrystalDiskMark on it (1 GiB file size) and screenshot what it reports?

[mariushm]

The SMART data looks good to me,  though kinda weird numbers.

660 power cycles count makes it like the drive was used in a system that was running almost all day and shut down over night, or maybe in a NAS machine.

The power on hours are equivalent of around 617 24h days which sort of matches with 24/7 usage of the drive.

 

I would guess the drive is very fragmented, so I would defragment it.

 

Speeds on hard drives are much lower on one end of the platters and increase as the data is read from the other edge of the platters.

Drive that old should have a minimum speed of at least 50 MB/s, i guess...

 

[Unknowniti]

1 hour ago, FakeKGB said:

Can you run CrystalDiskMark on it (1 GiB file size) and screenshot what it reports?

I ran CrystalDiskMark 2 times. One with the drive at 99% full capacity and one with a fresh "quick format" 0% capacity. The only major difference is the sequentiell read and write speed, which is about half the speed when the drive is full. Could it be that this is the problem, but then again, shouldn't 50MB/s be enough for a video playback?

[Unknowniti]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

I would guess the drive is very fragmented, so I would defragment it.

TBH I can't find the option to defragment this drive. When right clicking on it -> properties -> Tools -> optimize it opens the optimization window from windows but this drive does not show up there.

 

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

Speeds on hard drives are much lower on one end of the platters and increase as the data is read from the other edge of the platters.

Drive that old should have a minimum speed of at least 50 MB/s, i guess...

I just posted two crystaldiskmark reports. With 99% Capacity it is a little over 50 MB/s so..

[mariushm]

The speeds above are SEQUENTIAL ... meaning data arranged in a long string of bytes across the surface of the platter. Once the drive positions on a track, it can just spin the platter and read chunks of the track and dump them in the 8 MB of cache memory or push them to the system.

 

If the video player is not optimized for high bitrate videos, even a 1080p bitrate video that uses maybe 2-5 MB/s can cause problems if the video player reads from the drive in small chunks of let's say 500 KB - 1 MB.

Think of it like this ... the movie player requests 1 MB, the drive has to position heads on track, wait until platter spins enough to put the data under the head, read it then give it to the cpu / system.  if the movie player waits even a few ms to request the next chunk of data, the data may be in the 8 MB buffer or it may not, in which case the drive has to wait a spin of the platters until data is again available.

Also, if the movie was fragmented, the next 500 KB - 1 MB of data could be in some totally random position making the drive have to move the heads then again wait for the data to come under the heads, read it, send it to you.

 

On top of this latency, you have the sata to usb controller latency, which has to take the chunks of data and package them into usb packets and push them to the computer, and unless the controller is in a special mode, the usb controller may only poll the pc up to 125 times a second, so once every 8 ms it tells the pc " i've got new data, use it"

 

as for defragmenting, try  Defraggler or - my personal favorite - O&O Defrag (trial versions available)

 

HD Tune will also tell you a more realistic speed for the drive , again trial version available : https://www.hdtune.com/

 

 

[Unknowniti]

18 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The speeds above are SEQUENTIAL ... meaning data arranged in a long string of bytes across the surface of the platter.

I read that somewhere else, but I thought videos count towards files that do good along sequential speeds. I thought about it like this: The longer one video, the large is this file, which is good for reading in "one string" (from video start to end).

 

Defraggler said it was 0% fragmented.

So I guess filling those 930 GB completly is not efficient and I should use less. How much free space should I leave? I read that around 10-20% of the total capacity should be good enough? So let's say I fill it up to 830 GB and leave the rest free, could that solve my problems?