Really bad write speeds on an 12TB drive (17MB/s)

[Origami Cactus]

So I have this external WD mybook 12TB external drive that I got really cheap on amazon a year back or so.

It started out 180MB/s read write speeds, but now has dropped to 17MB/s writes, which is not even funny.

Being so cheap it was probably shingled magnetic recording(SMR) drive, but still, that slow?

I even made 4TB of free room on the drive before copying, so that it could use whatever sectors it wanted.

Smart data also seems fine. I have written like max 14TB to the drive itself. Obviously cable is good, usb 3.0 etc. Defrag shows 0%, optimization not needed.

So what is up with that?

 

I currently started DeFrag, because copying at those speeds is a cruel joke that I am not going to be a part of. Is WD SMR really that slow? I have an older 8TB seagate ironwolf, that even when fully full reads writes at 160MB/s, but that is 100% not SMR.

[DANK_AS_gay]

15 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

So I have this external WD mybook 12TB external drive that I got really cheap on amazon a year back or so.

It started out 180MB/s read write speeds, but now has dropped to 17MB/s writes, which is not even funny.

Being so cheap it was probably shingled magnetic recording(SMR) drive, but still, that slow?

I even made 4TB of free room on the drive before copying, so that it could use whatever sectors it wanted.

Smart data also seems fine. I have written like max 14TB to the drive itself. Obviously cable is good, usb 3.0 etc. Defrag shows 0%, optimization not needed.

So what is up with that?

 

I currently started DeFrag, because copying at those speeds is a cruel joke that I am not going to be a part of. Is WD SMR really that slow? I have an older 8TB seagate ironwolf, that even when fully full reads writes at 160MB/s, but that is 100% not SMR.

 

 

 

What are the specs of the rest of the system? Did you have anything else plugged in? Did you have anything else running in the background that you didn't know about? I'd wait for the defrag to finish, then try again. Then start to worry and make a backup.

[porina]

Don't know if WD SMR is much different from other people's SMRs, but SMR in general is bad if you want any write speed. Only had one Seagate and that dropped <30MB/s once the tiny write cache was filled.

 

Defrag shows if files are fragmented, but when writing it is more about the free space, which could be fragmented and not help.

[Kilrah]

The task manager shows simultaneous reads and writes, if you do both at the same time it's actually pretty good.

[Origami Cactus]

2 hours ago, Kilrah said:

The task manager shows simultaneous reads and writes, if you do both at the same time it's actually pretty good.

It was doing the simultanious read write by itself, when I paused the copying it stopped. My theory is that it was doing the SMR dance.

2 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

What are the specs of the rest of the system? Did you have anything else plugged in? Did you have anything else running in the background that you didn't know about? I'd wait for the defrag to finish, then try again. Then start to worry and make a backup.

The only thing touching that external drive was the file copying. I couldn't wait for that defrag, it would probably take longer than the heat death of the universe, because it was doing that also at 17mb/s.

 

2 hours ago, porina said:

Don't know if WD SMR is much different from other people's SMRs, but SMR in general is bad if you want any write speed. Only had one Seagate and that dropped <30MB/s once the tiny write cache was filled.

 

Defrag shows if files are fragmented, but when writing it is more about the free space, which could be fragmented and not help.

Yeah.

 

I canceled the defrag, now emptying the drive, and then I'll format it, hopefully gaining back the "first write speed" of the drive, because that was quite decent on it.

[Kilrah]

34 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

My theory is that it was doing the SMR dance.

SMR dance is internal to the drive, the OS has no idea about it so it can't be reported there. 

Did you have an explorer window open with the folder you were copying stuff into? I see you were copying images, so if you did Explorer might have been reading everything back just after writing it to get thumbnails, metadata etc.

 

36 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

and then I'll format it, hopefully gaining back the "first write speed" of the drive, because that was quite decent on it.

Just a format probably won't, modern SMR drives tend to support the "SATA Secure erase" / blkdiscard command that does the same as a wipe on an SSD and starts fresh but that won't work over USB, only if the drive is connected via SATA.

[porina]

1 hour ago, Origami Cactus said:

now emptying the drive, and then I'll format it, hopefully gaining back the "first write speed" of the drive, because that was quite decent on it.

Don't bother, it is unlikely to help much, and can you imagine moving that data off and back on it again?

[Origami Cactus]

@porina @Kilrah

 

I did it anyways LOL. I formatted the drive, turned off Bitlocker, and now I am back to normal 200MB/S write speeds. So Defrag would have probably worked too and taken similar amount of time.