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Internal HDD meant for Additional Storage/Steam Library Extremely SLOW

egyptianPWN
Go to solution Solved by mariushm,

The drive has a maximum sustained speed of 220 MB/s as can be seen in the datasheet for the 2 TB model.

The drive is most likely using SMR to write data to it, but write speeds shouldn't be affected to the point where you get that high drive usage and speeds dropping to 0.

 

Get some diagnostic software and check the SMART information ... the drive may have some defects and have a hard time writing the data to the platters in which case best to return the drive to warranty.

 

If you want CMR drives, the WD Red Plus is guaranteed to be CMR... anything else at low capacities is SMR. Usually drives with big cache (more than 128 MB) are SMR, as CMR drives don't really benefit from more than 128 MB of cache.

 

PS. It's very rare but not impossible to have a bad SATA cable or dirty SATA connector causing transmission errors, making the drive slow down.  Try and see if it's the same with another SATA cable, plugged in another SATA port on your motherboard.

Hi everyone! I have been a long time fan of LTT and this is officially my first post as a forum member! I'm having issues with my internal HDD and am no expert in computing by any means. In fact I am looking to make a better build that will allow for better performance once I start my full time job. 

 

Here are my computer specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Cores

GPU: Nvidia GTX 1660 SUPER

Main Drive: 1 TB SSD - no issues at all

Second drive: Seagate ST2000MD008 spec sheet found here

Motherboard: Gigabyte B450M-DS3H-CF (basic bitch board)

RAM: I think crucial 16GB @ 3600 MHz but for some reason task manager shows it at 2133 (probably some tuning thing I don't understand) 

 

 

So now to the problem, my hard drive is very very slow and I barely use it. I bought it for the purposes of backing up my college cloud storage (about 90GB) onto a hard disk. Anytime I try to copy to this drive I get my entire PC freezing up and the disk usage goes to 100% and the speeds go down to 0. I am not sure why this is happening but according to the spec sheet, connected via SATA it should read at the minimum 1.5 Gb/s which is ~180 MB/s, but I get 0 MB/s and sometimes it jumps up and down between smaller KB/s speeds. Does anyone know why this is happening? 

 

Things I have tried so far: optimizing drive and defragmenting, but that doesn't make sense as it is a basically clean drive since I can't get anything to even go onto it without taking days. Any help is appreciated and any guidance throughout fixing this would be a HUGE help! 

diskwtf.PNG

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One more note: I don't suspect the motherboard or the SATA cable or the formatting of the disk, which is NTFS. 

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You most likely got a SMR drive, SMR drives do that when their cache is full. You should also check SMART data for Relocated or Offline sectors.

mY sYsTeM iS Not pErfoRmInG aS gOOd As I sAW oN yOuTuBe. WhA t IS a GoOd FaN CuRVe??!!? wHat aRe tEh GoOd OvERclok SeTTinGS FoR My CaRd??  HoW CaN I foRcE my GpU to uSe 1o0%? BuT WiLL i HaVE Bo0tllEnEcKs? RyZEN dOeS NoT peRfORm BetTer wItH HiGhER sPEED RaM!!dId i WiN teH SiLiCON LotTerrYyOu ShoUlD dEsHrOuD uR GPUmy SYstEm iS UNDerPerforMiNg iN WarzONEcan mY Pc Run WiNdOwS 11 ?woUld BaKInG MY GRaPHics card fIX it? MultimETeR TeSTiNG!! aMd'S GpU DrIvErS aRe as goOD aS NviDia's YOU SHoUlD oVERCloCk yOUR ramS To 5000C18

 

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1 minute ago, Levent said:

You most likely got a SMR drive, SMR drives do that when their cache is full. You should also check SMART data for Relocated or Offline sectors.

Sorry I"m a total noob, can you elaborate on what an SMR drive is and where I get SMART data? Is it a driver thing I need to update to get all of my sectors online and functioning properly? 

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Just now, egyptianPWN said:

Sorry I"m a total noob, can you elaborate on what an SMR drive is and where I get SMART data? Is it a driver thing I need to update to get all of my sectors online and functioning properly? 

 

mY sYsTeM iS Not pErfoRmInG aS gOOd As I sAW oN yOuTuBe. WhA t IS a GoOd FaN CuRVe??!!? wHat aRe tEh GoOd OvERclok SeTTinGS FoR My CaRd??  HoW CaN I foRcE my GpU to uSe 1o0%? BuT WiLL i HaVE Bo0tllEnEcKs? RyZEN dOeS NoT peRfORm BetTer wItH HiGhER sPEED RaM!!dId i WiN teH SiLiCON LotTerrYyOu ShoUlD dEsHrOuD uR GPUmy SYstEm iS UNDerPerforMiNg iN WarzONEcan mY Pc Run WiNdOwS 11 ?woUld BaKInG MY GRaPHics card fIX it? MultimETeR TeSTiNG!! aMd'S GpU DrIvErS aRe as goOD aS NviDia's YOU SHoUlD oVERCloCk yOUR ramS To 5000C18

 

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The drive has a maximum sustained speed of 220 MB/s as can be seen in the datasheet for the 2 TB model.

The drive is most likely using SMR to write data to it, but write speeds shouldn't be affected to the point where you get that high drive usage and speeds dropping to 0.

 

Get some diagnostic software and check the SMART information ... the drive may have some defects and have a hard time writing the data to the platters in which case best to return the drive to warranty.

 

If you want CMR drives, the WD Red Plus is guaranteed to be CMR... anything else at low capacities is SMR. Usually drives with big cache (more than 128 MB) are SMR, as CMR drives don't really benefit from more than 128 MB of cache.

 

PS. It's very rare but not impossible to have a bad SATA cable or dirty SATA connector causing transmission errors, making the drive slow down.  Try and see if it's the same with another SATA cable, plugged in another SATA port on your motherboard.

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16 minutes ago, Levent said:

 

Thank you for tagging those, they were great videos. It would seeem that I have an smr version of the drive and after running a SMART test via SeaTools for windows and via CrystalDiskMark, it shows that the drive is not corrupted or damaged in any way (at least according to those softwares). On the spec sheet the maximum speed is around 200MB/s but if I get 50 at this point I'll be more than happy. Where do I go from here? 

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16 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The drive has a maximum sustained speed of 220 MB/s as can be seen in the datasheet for the 2 TB model.

The drive is most likely using SMR to write data to it, but write speeds shouldn't be affected to the point where you get that high drive usage and speeds dropping to 0.

 

Get some diagnostic software and check the SMART information ... the drive may have some defects and have a hard time writing the data to the platters in which case best to return the drive to warranty.

 

If you want CMR drives, the WD Red Plus is guaranteed to be CMR... anything else at low capacities is SMR. Usually drives with big cache (more than 128 MB) are SMR, as CMR drives don't really benefit from more than 128 MB of cache.

 

PS. It's very rare but not impossible to have a bad SATA cable or dirty SATA connector causing transmission errors, making the drive slow down.  Try and see if it's the same with another SATA cable, plugged in another SATA port on your motherboard.

Just tested via crystalMark and seatools for windows, no smart errors so I will try enabling xmp and transferring the file again. Then I will go to swap out the SATA cable with a different drive. Will update once those steps are taken. I agree I shouldn't be having drive speeds that slow. 

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25 minutes ago, offweek said:

It's an aside, but you need to enable the XMP profile in BIOS. 

 

This is done and verified. 

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43 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The drive has a maximum sustained speed of 220 MB/s as can be seen in the datasheet for the 2 TB model.

The drive is most likely using SMR to write data to it, but write speeds shouldn't be affected to the point where you get that high drive usage and speeds dropping to 0.

 

Get some diagnostic software and check the SMART information ... the drive may have some defects and have a hard time writing the data to the platters in which case best to return the drive to warranty.

 

If you want CMR drives, the WD Red Plus is guaranteed to be CMR... anything else at low capacities is SMR. Usually drives with big cache (more than 128 MB) are SMR, as CMR drives don't really benefit from more than 128 MB of cache.

 

PS. It's very rare but not impossible to have a bad SATA cable or dirty SATA connector causing transmission errors, making the drive slow down.  Try and see if it's the same with another SATA cable, plugged in another SATA port on your motherboard.

So I took my computer apart and found that the SATA cable was not seated all the way into the port so I moved it to another port and reseated the cable into both the drive and the motherboard and it fixed it! I had a smooth data transfer at a rate of about 50 MB/s. Thank you! Now I can finally put steam games on it and actually use it. Now that it is fixed, is it possible to increase the data transfer rate to hit near the 220 MB/s advertised? I still think it should be higher as the Sata ports on my motherboard are 6 Gb/s and so it the HDD. Any thoughts on improving it? 

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No, you can't really control the write speeds much.

 

That 220 MB/s sustained is the maximum achievable depending where the data is written, and it only applies to read speeds. 

Data is written on platters (discs) inside the drive, the motor spins at constant speed, so if the track is on the outside edge of the disc, data goes slower under the heads ... and if the data is on the inner tracks, the tracks are shorter length so you get more data in a rotation.

Basically a hard drive will have faster speeds at the start of the drive and as you get towards the end of the drive, the speeds slowly decrease

 

In the past, before SSDs existed, people took advantage of this by short-stroking drives - making small partitions on purpose, so that the read/write heads are always within those inner tracks to get the fastest speeds and lowest latencies... for example, they took 15k rpm 150 GB Cheetah drives and made a single 30 GB partition on them, which contains the inner tracks where data goes under the heads the fastest ... it gave a benefit to database servers, where reading random small amounts of data was important.

 

You can test your drive speeds with HD Tune, there's a trial version on their website you can download :   HD Tune website

 

DO NOT do the WRITE test, use only the default READ test.

 

Here's a bunch of tests on my own drives :

 

HGST NAS 4 TB : https://www.datastoreworks.com/datasheets/Hard-Drives/DS7K4000_DS.pdf

 

Datasheet says "Media transfer rate (Mbits/s, max) 1638" - that's  1638/8 =  204 MB/s  ... the test got to 174 MB/s which is close enough. The burst rate got to 373 MB/s (reading data from drive's cache) so I'm sure the drive runs at sata 6 gbps, otherwise it would be under 300 MB/s

 

But note how towards the outer edge of the platters, speed goes down to 79 MB/s

 

image.png.b3eb5fe17b75fa247ebc18e93afe6eb3.png

 

WD Red Plus (WD40EFZX) 4 TB  - CMR drive, more recent. : https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-plus-hdd.pdf

 

Datasheet says up to 175 MB/s for the 4 TB model, in reality it's even better, at 217 MB/s... and towards the edge it goes down to around 80 MB/s

Even though it's newer drive, with higher data density on the platters, speeds are not that much faster because the drive runs at 5400 rpm  while the HGST above runs at 7200 rpm.

 

image.png.00aed3eff72a5cce6cdcd01308335c27.png

 

 

WD Green 2 TB  : https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771438.pdf

 

Datasheet says max 147 MB/s ... it isn't lying.

 

image.png.badaa3170684ccd0300f4936c18b9627.png

 

 

By the way and a bit off topic, cd/dvd burners  work using CAV (constant angular velocity, where the speed of the motor increases gradually as the laser goes towards the edge to keep reading/writing speed constant) or some hybrid (multiple zones of constant angular velocity, where the read/write speeds goes up in small steps)

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