hard drive fill up will slow down read/write speed?

[thebest21445]

my wdc blue 1tb goes to almost 200mb/s on the read speed. on my main drive 500gb toshiba dt01aca050 goes to about 120mb/s. it is 59% filled up and i dont know if filling up my drive will slow down the speed. is this normal for my hard drive? and both drives are 7200rpm. if this is abnormal should i switch port my windows onto the wdc blue?

 

[glamdringfh]

Hi thebest,

HDD drives do get slower as they fill up, as the drive has to look past more and more data before it can retrieve it. That said, 59% isn't a point at which you should be noticing drastically slower read speeds due to space.

Your toshiba drive is known to be an unreliable HD, so if you can it certainly wouldn't hurt to start switching to Western Digital drives. Additionally, the Toshiba drive only has 32MB of Cache on the drive, which is also why it seems so much slower than the Western Digital Blue (which come with 64MB cache).

In the meantime you might consider running disk defragmentor on your system, as that will help your drive organize the data for slightly quicker processing.

 

[MarkW]

First of all, you do not have a hard drive that can read 200MB/sec. None of us do. You need an SSD to achieve those kinds of speeds. Most hard drives read at about 115Mb/sec and the fastest ones read at about 150MB/sec.

Nor can they write 200MB/sec.

Hard drives read and write speeds change as they store data. Inner tracks are physically smaller, outer tracks are larger. Tracks in the middle are the average speed. We as humans never really know where that data is being written. We just know that it has been stored, and never worry about it.

Drives will slow down if they become fragmented, and you can run Defrag to solve that problem. Fragmentation occurs when data is written, deleted new data is write covering some of the deleted files space, then more files are deleted, and more new files are written... Eventually, your hard drive is fragmented. One pass of Defrag, and its all organized neatly again.

 

[thebest21445]

Hi thebest,

HDD drives do get slower as they fill up, as the drive has to look past more and more data before it can retrieve it. That said, 59% isn't a point at which you should be noticing drastically slower read speeds due to space.

Your toshiba drive is known to be an unreliable HD, so if you can it certainly wouldn't hurt to start switching to Western Digital drives. Additionally, the Toshiba drive only has 32MB of Cache on the drive, which is also why it seems so much slower than the Western Digital Blue (which come with 64MB cache).

In the meantime you might consider running disk defragmentor on your system, as that will help your drive organize the data for slightly quicker processing.

thanks man. but i dont know how to switch windows to a different drive without having to wipe my drives and do a clean install of windows. i dont want a second windows ya know?

 

[thebest21445]

First of all, you do not have a hard drive that can read 200MB/sec. None of us do. You need an SSD to achieve those kinds of speeds. Most hard drives read at about 115Mb/sec and the fastest ones read at about 150MB/sec.

Nor can they write 200MB/sec.

Hard drives read and write speeds change as they store data. Inner tracks are physically smaller, outer tracks are larger. Tracks in the middle are the average speed. We as humans never really know where that data is being written. We just know that it has been stored, and never worry about it.

Drives will slow down if they become fragmented, and you can run Defrag to solve that problem. Fragmentation occurs when data is written, deleted new data is write covering some of the deleted files space, then more files are deleted, and more new files are written... Eventually, your hard drive is fragmented. One pass of Defrag, and its all organized neatly again.

okay i will defragment my toshiba drive thanks