WD Blue HDD With Extremely Slow Random Operations

[Aleksbgbg]

Hi everyone,

 

I have a friend with a WD Blue HDD which has unbearably slow random read / write performance.

 

I'm puzzled as to why this is. I tried defragging the drive but this did not help.

 

Note that the drive is 1TB but partitioned into 2. I wanted to consolidate it into 1 partition just in case this was somehow the cause, but this was not feasible because I couldn't move the data from the 2nd partition away from the drive as it takes so long.

 

Here are the benchmark results:

 

There is another drive in the system, much slower at 5900RPM, however it has similar performance, and particularly for random operations it is much faster:

 

Here are the drives in question - the slow drive is the Western Digital one:

There is a separate 970 SSD that is used as the OS drive.

 

Details from Speccy about the drives:

Slow WD drive:

Seagate drive (has been used for longer than the WD drive):

 

Does anyone know what might be the cause or what could fix it?

 

Thanks!

[da na]

WD Blue drives use SMR, a technology known for slower random performance. Your Seagate is also 5900 RPM, not 5400. 

[AI_Must_Di3]

Yeah, WD Blue drives are very middle of the road, not great, not terrible. If this drive is as old as i think it is your probably pretty lucky its still working. What does the sata data cable that its hooked up with have written on the wire itself? The WD seems to be doing sata 2 speeds like the seagate drive so thats your problem, something is downgrading it. Whether its the mobo chipset, the data wire to the drive or both.

[Needfuldoer]

41 minutes ago, da na said:

WD Blue drives use SMR, a technology known for slower random performance.

SMR drives are okay for a while, until they run out of fresh, untouched platter space to write onto. Their performance tanks once they have to keep track of all their destructive writes.

 

 

Since it's "only" a 1 TB drive, I recommend replacing it with either an SSD (any SSD) or a higher capacity hard drive.

[Godlygamer23]

This performance is pretty normal. Regardless of it being SMR or CMR, random performance is pretty terrible because of their mechanical nature. I have a benchmark attached of my Seagate 8TB drive from CrystalDiskMark, where the read performance is pretty similar to what you have, but the write performance is a bit better, but still not very good.

CrystalDiskMark_20230119101717.txt

[Aleksbgbg]

Thanks everyone, that makes sense! Learned something new, didn't know about SMR. At least I know it was meant to be that slow now. I guess if the partitions are combined and the drive is defragged, it could distribute the data so it doesn't have to overwrite as long as you're using a small fraction of it (e.g. less than 50% or 33% depending on how it's organized). But I'm not sure who gets to call the shot in defragging (the OS or the disk controller), I would be surprised if it distributes the data smartly from Windows defrag.