WD Green 1TB incredibly slow write speeds

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vaderag

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I recently got a new machine and decided to take apart my WD Nas drive and use the drives in the new machine.

Initially i set these up in Raid 1 (mirroring) but I was seeing poor read and write speeds (25MB/s read and 3Mb/s write on 50MiB files according to CDM, but slowed to ~1.5Mb/s in real usage copying photos across)

Because this was so poor I wondered if it was something to do with the raid config so removed the array and am now running them as individual drives.
This is giving me 56Mb/s read, but still the really poor 3.5Mb/s read.

The drives had jumpers on when I removed from the NAS but reading around it seemed the best setup for desktops is no jumpers so I removed them...

I have also run WD Lifeguard on both drives with them passing the extended tests successfully and all SMART readings seem to be fine.

I'm about ready to chuck them and buy something new, but thought I'd post on here to see if anyone has any other ideas of what might be up!

Thanks!
 
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D_Know_WD

D_Know_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Hi there vaderag,

Sorry that you are facing some issues with your WD drives. :(
So you've got two WD Greens right?(one of which is your OS drive) Which SATA ports are they attached to? Try to attach them to ports 0 and 1 let's say, and if there will be any difference.
Also, you can try something simple as just using different SATA and power cables.
Other things you can try:
- Defragment both drives.
- Go to your MOBO's website and update all drivers.
- Even though you've tested the drive with WD's DLG tool, you can try some third party tools as well: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Some screenshots of the results would be of help.

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD :)
 
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vaderag

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Hi guys, thanks for the reply.
Neither drive is the OS drive - i have an SSD doing that - this is connected to SATA 0

These two are connected to SATA 1&2

Surely defrag shouldnt make any difference - both these drives were formatted when I installed in this machine...

To kyzarvs - I'm afraid I don't agree with you - I ran the same tests on an external USB drive (Seagate, not WD but same speed rating) and am getting much better results - at least twice the speed, so I dont think the speed ratings i'm getting are normal - i appreciate you expect a slow down on smaller files, but this is just not right.

I'll post some screenshots in a bit (on a different machine right now)

 
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vaderag

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This may well be the case (although WD don't seem to make much mention of this on their listings on amazon etc!!) but cursory glances around the internet, (places such as here: http://www.alphr.com/western-digital/western-digital-caviar-green/29454/western-digital-caviar-green-1tb-review) state that I should be getting 74mb/s read - i'm getting a third of that...
 
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D_Know_WD

D_Know_WD

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I agree with vaderag. Even though WD Green are power efficient drives, their read write speed shouldn't really be that low.
You can attach one of the drives with your SSD's cables(just swap them). In case you can try those on another system, you will be sure if there is something wrong with the drives or with your system.(drivers, cables, ports, etc.)

D_Know_WD
 
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kyzarvs

kyzarvs

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Did you prove me wrong by trying some large files?

 
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vaderag

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No, but i think these screenshots will prove you wrong ;)

Just been running a few tests
http://prntscr.com/9et224

You will see my D drive and E drive (which are the pair of WD's perform VERY differently!!) - top left and right
(bottom left was from when I had them in Raid and bottom right is from a test on the external drive)

So... with that in mind - I'm going to go out on a limb and say something is wrong with the D drive... I'll try switching the cables over to see if that has any affect, but since those number are so poor by comparison I think despite the SMART reporting everything is fine, the disc is probably screwed...
 
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Someone Somewhere

Someone Somewhere

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Drives can read/write fastest from the outermost section of the platters, which is also the first part of the drive to be written to.

It's likely that the outermost section is full, so you're writing to some other part - maybe the middle, maybe the inner, maybe it changes.

You need to do these sorts of tests on a blank disk, and ideally with something that writes across the whole drive and tells you how the speed varies.
 
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kyzarvs

kyzarvs

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Happy to be proven wrong - but I genuinely think 'Greens are possible of being 'healthy' and this slow for small files :) . I swapped to a Green for my Steam drive on my main PC after having 2 Blacks fail in a year - it only has Steam on it and is dog-slow for the validation that happens on Steam start-up to the point of making games stutter and pause on loading textures if I don't wait a few mins after boot. Admittedly I have 2TB+ steam folder, but it's still pretty useless. In my Debian film server though, where they only have 500mb - 3gb files, they go really well and I'm happy with them.
 
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vaderag

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Okay, totally bizzare... i've just switched the cables around and now seem to be getting 'great' read and write speeds from both drives!

So, my assumption there is that maybe I had a loose connection of some sort... BUT wouldnt that reflect in the SMART readout?

 
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vaderag

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Yep, i'm 99% certain now that one of the drives is screwed. Switching SATA cables and that drive is still incredibly slow compared to the other drive, which sees comparatively normal transfer speeds.

What i don't understand is if it's in some way broken, why does SMART report everything okay? Anyone know?!
 
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Someone Somewhere

Someone Somewhere

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As I said, format the drive then try again. A drive that's mostly full is going to be very fragmented so the tool might not be able to find a contiguous block to write to, which will massively slow performance.

Also, you might want to try a larger size like 1-2GiB. A 50MiB test area is going to be pretty heavily impacted by any queries by Windows to the drive.
 
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vaderag

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As mentioned above - it was formatted 3 days ago... this is a brand new machine setup (except these drives, but they were formatted on install...)

Also, considering the two drives are identical, in all but serial number, there isn't going to be THAT much of a difference between speeds...
 
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vaderag

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Yeah - that few hundred gig WAS the test. 3 days of copying at 1mb/s...

Anyway - this is resolved - the one drive is definitely broken - tried it in a second machine and same issue. Still don't know why SMART is showing fine, but with that out of the system everything is working at normal parameters
 
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