WD Black 2.5 sata drive slow on windows 8. Sector size is 4k. What gives? 40MBps write

WD Black 2.5 sata drive slow on windows 8. Sector size is 4k. What gives? 40MBps write. This is a brand new WD black scorpion 500gb drive, on a brand new Zotac Zbox Nano CI320, quad core with 4gb of ram and Windows 8.1 x64.

Take a look at the pic and see from left are two USB 3.0 external drives and the last is my internal sata C drive that is showing issues. SMART scan came back A-ok! Kind of clueless here.

screenshot

Update Back with some better news, after uninstalling the drive in device manager, booting into safemode then out again, I got this and confirmed it through about 4 more of the tests: *note: the dip in data speed towards the end was from me doing something else with the drive while testing.

Update Tested again after 20 minutes since test above, it's back to slow 40mbps write speed :( Testing on another system now! Then RMA if need be.

As it stands now: Sometimes getting full speed, mostly getting capped 40MBps write :(

Could someone please take a look at the SMART data and tell me if anything looks off to you? enter image description here

Well guys, I think I've finally figured it out. It seems to have been a temp issue. I took some action to reduce temps, and attached two big solid copper blocks with thermal paste to the label side of the hdd. Temps now are going from 50c-60c variably. I'm probably going to make use of my eSata port on this thing, and relocate the internal drive to an external enclosure and eventually put in an SSD in the near future. :) My guess was the drive was going into a low power mode to reduce temps. That's the only thing I can think of.

DemonCamber

Posted 2014-09-16T21:06:25.877

Reputation: 9

Reads look like 80MBps to me from your graph. – David Schwartz – 2014-09-16T21:30:27.913

The write should be just about the same, that's what I don't get. – DemonCamber – 2014-09-16T21:37:52.950

As of right now I'm falling back to the windows AHCI driver as opposed to the Intel one to test and see any changes. – DemonCamber – 2014-09-16T21:38:58.237

Something is definitely not right. I just benched a very old system here with sata drives and it's hitting 90-100 read/write speeds. Something is capping my new system at 40. What could cause this? – DemonCamber – 2014-09-16T22:19:14.917

WOW this is too funny. I just went into safemode and did a bench there and it's now giving me the full write speed as it should.. wth – DemonCamber – 2014-09-16T22:30:28.723

Booted back into windows, ran another bench, the write was much higher this time, but fluctuating. Went to copy files over, now it's at 40 again. Stopped transfer, benched, and now capped back at 40... This makes no sense. – DemonCamber – 2014-09-16T22:53:45.193

That's certainly not normal for a WD Black drive. Is the storage driver using Native Command Queuing?

– bwDraco – 2014-09-16T23:03:19.303

It should be, as before I installed Windows 8 the bios was set to AHCI for sata. But I just altered two registry settings for enabling AHCI in windows for good measure, going to reboot now and see what happens :) – DemonCamber – 2014-09-16T23:28:01.837

As far as Windows 8/bios setup, AHCI should be enabled. How to tell if it's activated, I do not know. Still seeing slower write speeds. Hopefully a fix turns up somehow. – DemonCamber – 2014-09-17T04:48:32.767

If it were something with the partition table it would have been slow when reading as well, so I doubt that this is causing it. But this is still a valid thing to check - stranger things have happened. I would try different SATA port, different SATA cable, different PC. If no change you should go for RMA. – Techpumpkin_WD – 2014-09-17T09:56:21.573

This is not an answer to the original question. It should be a comment to another answer. – DavidPostill – 2014-09-17T10:22:23.993

This particular pc is a nano pc, it has only one sata port internally, however I could take it out and test it. The WD Tools gave it a clear bill of health though, not sure how reliable that is. The odd thing is it seems to be faster in safe mode when I do the benchmark again, could that point more to a driver issue? – DemonCamber – 2014-09-17T20:26:28.810

Could someone please take a look at the SMART data and tell me if anything looks off to you? – DemonCamber – 2014-09-18T22:46:52.483

Answers

How have you used this drive? If it is quite new, the solution might be as simple as formatting (not quick-formatting) the drive. I remember a time when HDDs came unformatted and your PC had to do a format on the blocks it was going to write to, before it could actually write the files. (If the drive had been formatted completely, the performance would be as expected and consistent) But I am not sure whether this scenario still applies today.

My suggestion: Create a partition on the drive (choose a size as large as possible but do not format the newly created partition) and run the test again. Then format said partition and try again.

Betaminos

Posted 2014-09-16T21:06:25.877

Reputation: 107

Good idea, this is a new (2 day old) system build. So I can do that. – DemonCamber – 2014-09-16T21:27:27.763

I've seen similar drive behavior caused by a misbehaving flash chip on the PCB. It would show faster, almost normal write speed for a short while after boot (the system has been turned off for a few hours before that). Then only the write speed will start fluctuating and then go slow again. If this is the case here I would test on a different system to confirm the results and if there is no change - go for RMA. However if it's performing as expected in safe mode for a long period of time, you should dig into Windows. It could be a driver, but it could also be a process. It could also be due to insufficient power, but that usually happens with external drives.

Techpumpkin_WD

Posted 2014-09-16T21:06:25.877

Reputation: 416

Yeah the safe mode thing was a fluke, I just tested it and it was slow again while in safe mode. But I think I've fixed it. Have to wait a bit to test again. – DemonCamber – 2014-09-18T20:43:20.320

I'm really curious about what caused it. SMART results seem perfectly fine to me. – Techpumpkin_WD – 2014-09-19T06:58:43.083

Here's my thoughts. I'm still trying to find out what the actual safe/max temp is for my drive, WD's pdf for my drive say 60c, but does not state if that's the max safe temp, just operating temp. I've been reading around and hearing that 2.5 7200 drives operate at higher temps than 3.5 drives, and can tolerate higher temps, but I cannot find any data on what they are specifically. I'm seeing idle temps of 55c and 60c max. Is it possible that the drive could have been over safe temp and capped the max rotation speed to reduce heat? My external drives are all idle at 30c and don't fluctuate. – DemonCamber – 2014-09-19T22:11:21.300

continued: So I'm thinking because this is in a tiny passive mini pc, it's getting excess heat exposed from the cpu/cooler. So I ordered an external aluminum enclosure and will move the internal drive into that and just use it like that. That will both benefit the CPU and HDD temp all in one. I took the drive out and tested in another pc, it was idling fine at a cool 38c no matter what I threw at it, and giving me full bandwidth. I put it back into my mini pc and took two huge copper plates I had laying around from a previous project, put some thermal paste on them and attached them to the HDD – DemonCamber – 2014-09-19T22:13:00.430

continued: And now with the copper plates I haven't had any slow downs at all, and the drive seems to be running great, just at a temp I'm not comfortable with. – DemonCamber – 2014-09-19T22:15:46.943