Slow drive?

[the gremlin]

I use a WD blue hard drive to do daily backups of my entire SSD.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2Qqbt6/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd30ezrz

 

This drive (build) is 8 months old, and is working great. However, I recently changed the name of my PC from the default "desktop" name to her actual name (Penny) lol.

After doing this, it completely screwed up the backup archive I had, my HDD filled up, and I figured I should just erase the partitions I made, start from scratch, and back-up again.

The first new backup took forever, (as expected) but then the second one took forever as well. and now they still all take forever it seems.

 

It's read/writing at 36.5 MB/s during the backup. I don't know the old speed, but its quite the snail now.

In disk mgmt, the drive said "Healthy (At Risk)" so I followed the "Reactivate Disk" instructions and it says healthy now.

 

It's still slow.

 

I didn't format earlier, I just deleted volume. should I try that?

 

What tools can I use to figure out what's wrong with this drive?

 

thanks!

 

[unknownmiscreant]

11 minutes ago, the gremlin said:

I use a WD blue hard drive to do daily backups of my entire SSD.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2Qqbt6/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd30ezrz

 

This drive (build) is 8 months old, and is working great. However, I recently changed the name of my PC from the default "desktop" name to her actual name (Penny) lol.

After doing this, it completely screwed up the backup archive I had, my HDD filled up, and I figured I should just erase the partitions I made, start from scratch, and back-up again.

The first new backup took forever, (as expected) but then the second one took forever as well. and now they still all take forever it seems.

 

It's read/writing at 36.5 MB/s during the backup. I don't know the old speed, but its quite the snail now.

In disk mgmt, the drive said "Healthy (At Risk)" so I followed the "Reactivate Disk" instructions and it says healthy now.

 

It's still slow.

 

I didn't format earlier, I just deleted volume. should I try that?

 

What tools can I use to figure out what's wrong with this drive?

 

thanks!

 

Try clean the disk using the command line utility diskpart.

 

Google for how to do this, itll be faster than be explaining it.

[Septimus]

The HDD won't always read/write at its advertised speed. I would recomend downloading something like Crystal Disk Mark and running a test with that to see if it truly it lacking in the performance department. 

[AshleyAshes]

If you're trying to back up an ENTIRE system drive, that'll be a TONNE of small files and those won't copy the fastest at all, no.

[the gremlin]

1 minute ago, AshleyAshes said:

If you're trying to back up an ENTIRE system drive, that'll be a TONNE of small files and those won't copy the fastest at all, no.

but it has been running smoothly up until now

[unknownmiscreant]

6 minutes ago, the gremlin said:

but it has been running smoothly up until now

8 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

If you're trying to back up an ENTIRE system drive, that'll be a TONNE of small files and those won't copy the fastest at all, no.

Modern HDDs are actually surprisingly fast for small files. Nowhere near SSD performance, but acceptable for backups.

 

Also, that 35MB/s looks like your topping out a USB2.0 link. Is the drive connected over USB?

[the gremlin]

7 minutes ago, unknownmiscreant said:

Modern HDDs are actually surprisingly fast for small files. Nowhere near SSD performance, but acceptable for backups.

 

Also, that 35MB/s looks like your topping out a USB2.0 link. Is the drive connected over USB?

Nope, SATA. and it's at like 25 MB rn.....

[unknownmiscreant]

3 minutes ago, the gremlin said:

Nope, SATA. and it's at like 25 MB rn.....

Hmm, try a different cable and connector on motherboard.

 

You may be better just to buy a new drive, as that would save you the pain of a drive failure.

[the gremlin]

54 minutes ago, unknownmiscreant said:

Hmm, try a different cable and connector on motherboard.

 

You may be better just to buy a new drive, as that would save you the pain of a drive failure.

Seriously? there's no little hiccup like needing to defragment or format a certain way?

[unknownmiscreant]

9 minutes ago, the gremlin said:

Seriously? there's no little hiccup like needing to defragment or format a certain way?

I don't think so. Try copy a single large file (at least 4gb) to the drive, and see what the transfer speeds are like.