A new HDD slows down considerably during transfers - WD10EZEX BLUE SATA 6GB/S 7200RPM 64MB (1TB)

[GigaP]

Hello. I just bought and installed a new hdd (1TB WD blue from the title) and I'm already seeing some strange things. Namely transfer/copy speeds when writing to the disk.
I have another 1TB Samsung hdd which I'll be handing over to my brother, so I used it to test some files being copied between the two disks. I chose a 25.7 GB mkv file. This is what happened:
- from WD to Samsung: It begun copying at a rate of ~190 MB/s and then slowly dropped to ~85 MB/s towards the end. The file was copied in about 7 minutes.
- from Samsung to WD: It usually begins at around 90 MB/s and then it slowly starts dropping, I even had the patience to wait for about 5 minutes until it dropped to 6 MB/s, but then I stopped it as it still had over an hour to go.

(if anyone's wondering how I had that mkv file on WD... I copied it from an external drive beforehand and that took 2 hours)

Other problems: I installed Steam and downloaded a game. The download was continuously being interrupted as it was waiting to write to disk. I've read online that this can be a problem with Steam, but this was the first thing that kinda made me uneasy.

Screenshot of Disk Management window: (D is the sluggish one)

My hardware (if it's of any use):
MBd: GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3
CPU: AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core 4GHz + Scythe Mugen SCMGD-1000
GPU: AMD Sapphire Toxic R9 280X 3GB
RAM: 16GB - 2x Crucial BX Sport DDR3 8GB
PSU: Corsair RM850
SSD: Samsung 830 256GB

Are there any suggestions? Or did I receive a bad drive?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey GigaP. Sorry to hear you're having such issues with your drive. I'd recommend that you download DLG (Data Lifeguard Diagnostic) from here: Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows and run both tests (Quick and Extended) to see what's the situation with the drive and if they show anything alarming. Other than that you could try the drive with different SATA and/or power connections to see if the issue persists after that. It would be even better if you could try it with a different computer as well.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[GigaP]

Hey, thanks for replying. I ran the diagnostic and there were no problems. Then I moved both disks to another computer and did some copying between them. Copy speed from Samsung to my WD was constant at about 50 MB/s which I think is normal, so there seems to be some sort of a problem with my configuration. Now I'm gonna try fiddling with SATA connections as you suggest.

P.S. I've seen in another thread that a certain user had an interesting problem with a fan causing magnetic field problems or something of that nature. So now that I have the WD drive back in my PC, I even removed the fan which was right next to the drives to see if there's any difference, but there isn't.

Solution: I've found it. I've put the drive into a different slot and connected it with a different SATA cable. Now it works as it should.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Awesome. Good job on solving and fixing the issue. As for the thread with the fan, honestly, that's the first time I've heard of something like this.
Happy holidays.
Cheers

 

[fzabkar]

To me, that doesn't sound like a solution, only a workaround. I think the problem may eventually come back to bite you.

See this thread:
http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=30158&p=208544#p208544

A WD user did some extensive testing to narrow down a slow write issue with a WD drive that passed all tests including DLG. Unfortunately he was not able to determine the root cause of the problem.

In your case I would confirm that the Samsung drive does not have a read problem.

 

[GigaP]

I glanced over that thread, but they're mostly talking about things I'm not too familiar with, because hard drives are my weakest subject of expertise, so to speak. I appreciate your concern, but the drive seems to be functioning properly now. I performed a read test with HD Tune Pro and I think it averaged at around 145 MB/s. I didn't do a write test as that can harm your drive if I'm not mistaken, but there are no such problems as before when, for example, I even tried to copy a 32 GB file from SSD and the copy speed immediately plummeted under 10 MB/s with 4 hours of ETA. When I copied that same file now, the speed was constant at around 180 MB/s with just over 5 minutes of ETA.

So I hope this is not a pyrrhic victory as you suggest, but I'm not entirely sure what more I could do to ensure everything is functioning properly.