Sata hard drive wont copy any faster than 8mb/s

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emmjey

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Jul 8, 2012
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Hello,
I low-level formatted a hard drive and since then, it won't copy any faster than 8mb/s. It's a SATA I hard drive. Any ideas?
 
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Most drive will not let you do a low level format. What tool did you use?

Can you post OS version (win7, xp, etc), drive model.

How are you measuring write rate? Can you download HDTUNE (google it) and post drive performance and CPU utilization (both are reported by hdtune). If you changed the default block size for the hdtuen benchmark please reset it before running test.

There are a number of things that will do this, example dropping out of DMA into one of the PIO modes.
 
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It's a Hitachi drive 1 TB in size. Model no. HDS7210CLA332. I am running Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64 on a Toshiba C655 Laptop with a Core 2 Duo processor, with 4GB of RAM.

Here's the readout from HDTUNE (oh, by the way, I used the HDD Low Level format tool from hddguru website to format the drive as Windows was having issues formatting it. Currently, I use the disc in a docking station as an external drive.

I used TeraCopy to measure the write rate. Here are the details:

Read:

Transfer Rate -
Minimum 26.8 MB/s
Maximum 32.4 MB/s
Average 31.1 MB/s
CPU Usage 15.4%
Access Time 15.2sec

I can't currently run any write test on it as it as I have data currently on it and it is asking me to remove all partitions.
 
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I don't think so. Some SMART aware programs tell me the disc is good, others say it's faulty. I don't know. I have decided to replace it in the upcoming months although this is a drive I hardly used; used it mainly to do offline backups. I did the low level format to fix some bad clusters that kept popping up. Using Crystal Disk Mask to do a series of three read/write tests, I get the following:

Test 1 (Seq Read): Read speed = 27.19 MB/s Write Speed = 7.129 MB/s

Test 2 (512k): Read speed = 16.35 MB/s Write Speed = 6.709 MB/s

Test 3 (4k): Read speed = 0.326 MB/s Write Speed = 0.332 MB/s

Test 4 (4k QD32) Read speed = 0.568 MB/s Write Speed = 0.596 MB/s



There you have it guys. Any ideas?
 
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No. I have it marked as the default under Windows 7 as "quick removal" which means write cache is disabled. Thing is I have a Western Digital 1.5 TB and when plugged into the same docking station works normally. The drive in question only started copying that slow after the format.
 
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Hi, the funny number here is CPU utilization:


Transfer Rate -
Minimum 26.8 MB/s
Maximum 32.4 MB/s
Average 31.1 MB/s
CPU Usage 15.4%
Access Time 15.2sec

Can you download HDTUNE (google it) and leave the defaults alone and run the benchmark:

Your drive should get 50-100MB/sec at large sequential blocks with no cpu utilization.

If you benchmark RANDOM 4Ks then your drive should do about 100 4Ks/sec = less than 1Mb/sec.

Not knowing what terracopy does for a benchmark, your drive may be working great or may be running in PIO mode or something stupid like that.

Strongly recommend you run HDTUNE before you replace a drive. I can't think of a drive failure that would give these results for large sequential data. IF these results are not from benchmarking large sequential then these are GOOD results.

p.s. in HDtune you can change the benchmark block size and see the MB/sec drop.
 
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The results that I posted were not done using Tera Copy. I mentioned Tera Copy as an answer to the first question as to what did I first used to measure the write speed. The results I posted with CPU utilisation was done using Crystal Disk Mask. HDTune will not perform the test without first wiping the data (That's the message it reports) unless I'm wrong.
 
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According to the HDTune manual, "Both read and write transfer rate can be measured. To prevent accidental data loss, the write test can only be performed on a disk with no partitions."

That's using the Benchmark settings, or must I use the file benchmarks instead?

Anyway, I proceeded to use the File Benchmarks. Here are the results:

Drive Temp 34°C, CPU 9.2%

100 MB of Data (Using default settings)

Sequential Read: 29205 KB/s Write: 3889 KB/s
4 KB Random single 85 IOPS 66 IOPS
4 KB random multi 159 IOPS 142 IOPS


500 MB of Data (using default settings)

Sequential Read: 28988 KB/s Write: 3858 KB/s
4 KB Random single 77 IOPS 79 IOPS
4 KB random multi 145 IOPS 143 IOPS


1000 MB of Data (using default settings)

Sequential Read: 23612 KB/s Write: 4345 KB/s
4 KB Random single 73 IOPS 71 IOPS
4 KB random multi 130 IOPS 138 IOPS


There you have it. Your thoughts.
 
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OK, makes sense now. You are running HDTUNE PRO and I am using the old free version. So I have no way to bridge from your numbers to mine. Unless you download free version from here: hdtune_255.exe 628 KB (2nd one down) http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

Here is a link to HDTUNE PRO test results, you can cross check your drive if you can figure out which benchmark they ran (assuming its not the free hdtune benchmark) . http://www.hdtune.com/testresults.html
 
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I'll try it when I get the time. But when I downloaded HDTUNE, I got the pro version well, more a trial of the pro that defaults to the free after the free trial is up.
 
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WOW. 3858 KB/s = less than 4MB/sec. Maybe the "low level format" tool you used did something to turn off the internal 32MB cache.

Contact Hitachi support and see if they have a diagnostic tool that will fix. I think this one will do it, but you need to verify http://www.hgst.com/support/index-files/simpletech-legacy-downloads#FeatureTool

See if there is a firmware update you can load to the drive that might accidentally reset whatever got hit if the FTOOL.EXE doesn't reset. I did not get a search hit on the model number you posted.
 
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