Extreme Slow Read on small files

I have a WD Green wd10eads 1 TB hard drive. I got this drive from a WD MyBook Studio. I removed the external case and placed this drive in my server (the drive had the 1.5 PHY jumper enabled and I removed it).

I've formatted the drive as NTFS with 64k allocation (though I tried with default allocation with no difference in the benchmark). I've performed a quick format and have not tried full format, if that would make a difference.

When running ATTO disk test, for some reason the first 3 read speeds, .5, 1 and 2 are horrible, though the write speeds are fine. Once it gets to 4k, then the read performance is good.

What could possibly be causing these read speeds?

Even if ATTO is right and I can't fix this, with a 64k allocation and the drive being used to store movies, does this really concern me? Technically, the smallest any file can be written is 64k, and ATTO says 111MB write speed at 64k. So would .5-2k performance really concern me?

Or my biggest concern, does this mean something is physically wrong with the drive and my data is not safe?


By jrwalte