Firecuda seems slow

[Troika]

So, I've been running a 2TB Seagate Firecuda in my Clevo P750TM1-G as my game and mass storage drive for a few months now and I'm not very satisfied with it. It doesn't seem any faster than a 7200rpm mechanical drive and actually, it feels slower. Sure, sometimes I do get sustained transfers into the 180MB/s, which is fantastic, but then it very quickly drops down to about 70MB/s and as low as 200KB/s. I have performed a drive remap when I found two blocks that had response times over 600ms. I haven't check again to see if there more bad/failing blocks have developed but it seems like I would have been better off paying a little extra for two 1TB 7200rpm drives and raiding them together rather than going with a single 2TB Firecuda.

What I was wondering is if this is common behavior with hybrid drives or if the one I have is just not a very good example of them? I'll provide some screenshots of my drive performance later after I do some more digging. All I really know at this point is that the smart is being reported as good.

[Electronics Wizardy]

What does the smart data look like?

 

Nothing here seems wrong, hdds are slow, and will get very low speeds when you need lots of iops. Want a fast drive, get a ssd.

 

What does crystal disk mark and info look like?

[seagate_surfer]

Run the diagnostics using Seatools, please download, follow the installation wizard, and share results of your HDD through here:

• https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

[Troika]

I tried Seatools but it didn't really give me more than "Passed Smart 100%" so I didn't include any screenshots of that.

[Troika]

59 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What does the smart data look like?

 

Nothing here seems wrong, hdds are slow, and will get very low speeds when you need lots of iops. Want a fast drive, get a ssd.

 

What does crystal disk mark and info look like?

I've been planning on moving onto a pair of 1TB SSDs for my laptop but I can't afford a $300 expense like that right now

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Troika said:

I've been planning on moving onto a pair of 1TB SSDs for my laptop but I can't afford a $300 expense like that right now

There are a few things you can try.

 

The disk seems fine, so there aren't any errors to worry about.

 

Performance is a bit low, so try a defrag, but there isn't much you can do. Testing the cache is a pain, but it should only help here.

[Troika]

40 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

There are a few things you can try.

 

The disk seems fine, so there aren't any errors to worry about.

 

Performance is a bit low, so try a defrag, but there isn't much you can do. Testing the cache is a pain, but it should only help here.

Before I left for work, I set Victoria to do a surface scan just to make sure no bad/failing blocks showed up again. I'll see about defrag and cache testing tonight when I get home. I just need this thing to work decently well until I have enough for SSDs to replace it.

[Troika]

Surface scan came back with two warning blocks and a butt ton of 200+ms blocks. Me thinks I should consider remapping the drive. o 3o

[seagate_surfer]

18 hours ago, Troika said:

I tried Seatools but it didn't really give me more than "Passed Smart 100%" so I didn't include any screenshots of that.

 

 

SeaTools' PASS or FAIL is the standard we use to determine whether a hard drive is still in good working order or is failing. A drive may be failing but continue to function normally for a short time, so SeaTools is often a better judge of whether the hard drive is failing than the drive's functionality at any given moment. Please remember that these third-party programs do not have proprietary access to Seagate hard disk information, SeaTools is more consistent and more accurate and is the standard Seagate uses to determine hard drive failure.

 

Your drive is passing the test, so I recommend you to reformat your unit using Windows Disk Management:

• Create and format a hard disk partition - Windows Help

If you want, you can try prior to formatting some other troubleshooting commands like CHKDSK or SFC /SCANNOW. And then you can even try a more hardcore reset by performing zero fill if none of this helps, this can take many hours depending on many factors including the drive capacity, so leave adequate time for this.

[Troika]

Seems like the block remapping helped quite a bit. Write speed went down, which is weird but that's not where I was having issues, the read speeds were pretty bad. I did redo the disk benchmark twice more but the write speeds stayed low in the Q8T8, Q32 and Q1 of 4KiB. The sequential write was greatly improved, nearly doubling in speed. The surface scan definitely shows the performance drop off was much less choppy and got smoothed out, the remaining green blocks were sub-125ms, which is nice. That odd down spike at the beginning of the scan still exists so I'm not sure what that is, maybe just a anomaly. I just hope it stays that way for four more months until I can do my SSD upgrade. ^^;

[Troika]

On 11/15/2018 at 9:13 AM, seagate_surfer said:

 

SeaTools' PASS or FAIL is the standard we use to determine whether a hard drive is still in good working order or is failing. A drive may be failing but continue to function normally for a short time, so SeaTools is often a better judge of whether the hard drive is failing than the drive's functionality at any given moment. Please remember that these third-party programs do not have proprietary access to Seagate hard disk information, SeaTools is more consistent and more accurate and is the standard Seagate uses to determine hard drive failure.

 

Your drive is passing the test, so I recommend you to reformat your unit using Windows Disk Management:

• Create and format a hard disk partition - Windows Help

If you want, you can try prior to formatting some other troubleshooting commands like CHKDSK or SFC /SCANNOW. And then you can even try a more hardcore reset by performing zero fill if none of this helps, this can take many hours depending on many factors including the drive capacity, so leave adequate time for this.

We use Victoria in our service department because it gives us more information about a drive and what exactly is wrong with is. Some things are obvious like failing controller boards since they give a different error code or physically problems like bad bearings or heads since they tend to make strange and distinct sounds. I'm sure oem specific tools like Seatools have their place but when we have a customer that asks "Why is my drive failing?" after we tell them that it doesn't pass a smart test, that's where we need outside tools that give more information that we can give customers as tangible reasons other than it failed a smart test. Its easier to explain certain failures too.

[seagate_surfer]

I see what you are saying and it is totally understandable, as mentioned earlier if running commands to try to fix the system files and the partition didn't help, but still try to get the unit replaced if nothing worked for you.