Very slow HDD?

[Makmarian]

My HDD is very slow, it's a seagate barracuda 2TB, i have about 1.5 TB left, but it is still slow, when I open file manager, it can take up to almost 10 seconds before files shows up. What should I do about this? 

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

is it a 7200RPM ??

[emistery]

Try to run HDTune to check for bad sectors  http://www.hdtune.com/

[Makmarian]

1 minute ago, LawrenceBarnes2013 said:

is it a 7200RPM ??

Yes

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

2 minutes ago, Makmarian said:

Yes

Then check in the Bios if you have it running on quiet/power saving mode, because that makes it spin a lot slower 

[Captain_WD]

4 hours ago, Makmarian said:

~snip~

 

Hey there Makmarian,

 

As @emistery suggested, you should check the health of the drive and see if it's functioning properly. Benchmarking the drive can also tell you at what speeds it is running. I would recommend using the manufacturer's tool. This should tell you if the drive is the cause of the problem or something else is bottlenecking the performance of your computer. 

 

@LawrenceBarnes2013 A drive cannot spin slower or faster than its factory rpm as this will cause critical issues and the drive won't operate at all. The question if a drive can have a variable speed is a complex and it involves many sides of the way a HDD works. Generally HDDs have fixed rotational speed doe to a few major reasons (among many other)

 

 - The way the drive works is that it has an actuator arm that carries the read/write head that hovers over the HDD's magnetic platter, reading from and writing to it (larger drives have multiple platters with multiple actuators and heads). The head hovers and stays over the spinning platter with the help of the wind current that it creates. A simple analog of the way the head "flies" over the platter is to imagine a huge airplane (Boeing 747 for example) that flies about 30 centimeters above the surface. Variable rpm would bean variable current and thus variable hovering height which creates a lot of problems. This is one of the reasons why physical bad sectors cause more and more problems over time (the small scratches on the platter create air pockets that cause the head to bounce up and down, landing on the platter and creating more and more dents and scratches). 

 

 - Another huge problem would be the way the data is read and written on the drive. Imagine a classic record player and the way it works. It spins at a certain speed so you can listen to the proper music. Increasing or decreasing the rpm of the platter actually alters the sound and makes the music sound different. The same principle can be said about HDDs. The timings that the head writes and reads with on the platter are tightly dependent on the specific rpm. If you use the same head with the same firmware from a drive that has 5,400 rpm and put it on a drive that has 7,200 rpm it won't function at all as it has different timings set to it.

 

 - The way a drive formats is also closely tied to its rotational speed.

 

 - Unlike CD players or optical drives, the platter here doesn't change speeds when the head reaches the inner or outer part of the platter. CD/DVD players change the rpm that they spin the drive according to where the laser reads or writes on the disk. This is not the case with HDDs. Optical drives tend to have the same read/write speed regardless if they are doing this on the inner or outer part of the disk. HDDs actually have differences. This is why Short Stroking is a thing

 

Here's a topic on this: http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/27776-variable-rpm-hdds/

 

Hit me up if you need more info

 

Captain_WD.

Edited February 3, 2016 by Captain_WD

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

2 minutes ago, Captain_WD said:

. 

 

@LawrenceBarnes2013 A drive cannot spin slower or faster than its factory rpm as this will cause critical issues and the drive won't operate at all. The question if a drive can have a variable speed is a complex and it involves many sides of the way a HDD works. Generally HDDs have fixed rotational speed doe to a few major reasons (among many other)

 

 

are you sure, because as far as i know they do 

[Captain_WD]

27 minutes ago, LawrenceBarnes2013 said:

~snip~

 

Power Saving mode usually enables the storage drives to spin down more often and stay in standby mode instead of running for longer periods and thus the drives need more time to spin back up more often. This way the computer saves some energy by not spinning the platter most of the time but rather keep it at 0 rpm and when needed it spins it back up.

 

Captain_WD.

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

2 minutes ago, Captain_WD said:

 

Power Saving mode usually enables the storage drives to spin down more often and stay in standby mode instead of running for longer periods and thus the drives need more time to spin back up more often. This way the computer saves some energy by not spinning the platter most of the time but rather keep it at 0 rpm and when needed it spins it back up.

 

Captain_WD.

Thanks Dude, so i get that most consumer drives are either sustained at 0RPM, accelerating, or at max Speed 

[Captain_WD]

8 minutes ago, LawrenceBarnes2013 said:

~snip~

Or spinning down to 0 rpm, yes

[Makmarian]

I find it out, thanks to you guys and some guys at reddit/r/techsupport, it was because it's a (green version), and when it's not being used for a while it's go in a some kind of stand-by mode. The way I fixed it was to download a program that writes files to the drive every (x amount of) seconds, default every 7 seconds. The program is called KeepAliveHD (http://keepalivehd.codeplex.com/)