[SOLVED] Striped hard drive write speed dropping to virtually nothing

[John McMullin]

Hi everyone,

I recently got a new computer with an AMD 5800X processor and 128Gb of Ram, Windows 10 Pro. I moved a striped pair of 8Tb Ironwolf drives out of my old PC into this one for use as a single, striped media drive.

Previously I never seemed to have a problem with this drive. Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test gave them read and write speeds over 400MB/s. But a couple of days ago I was copying a large volume of data from a client's Lacie and the transfer speed declined to 4MB/s. I tested the disk speed with the Blackmagic app which confirmed it was the media drive causing the slowdown.

Occasionally the drive's performance comes back to what it was but the problem always recurs at some point during the day. A system restart doesn't always fix it. Having backed everything up, I even deleted the volumes and remade the stripe and tested the clean, vacant drive. This didn't help. The only thing I haven't done is done a full format of the disk as it seems like that would take forever.

Any ideas why this is happening. The drive is working OK some of the time so I'd have thought it must be physically OK. Was wondering if it was a problem with the way Windows sees it, files permissions or something.

Many thanks for your help.

John

 

[Bob.B]

Hi everyone,

I recently got a new computer with an AMD 5800X processor and 128Gb of Ram, Windows 10 Pro. I moved a striped pair of 8Tb Ironwolf drives out of my old PC into this one for use as a single, striped media drive.

Previously I never seemed to have a problem with this drive. Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test gave them read and write speeds over 400MB/s. But a couple of days ago I was copying a large volume of data from a client's Lacie and the transfer speed declined to 4MB/s. I tested the disk speed with the Blackmagic app which confirmed it was the media drive causing the slowdown.

Occasionally the drive's performance comes back to what it was but the problem always recurs at some point during the day. A system restart doesn't always fix it. Having backed everything up, I even deleted the volumes and remade the stripe and tested the clean, vacant drive. This didn't help. The only thing I haven't done is done a full format of the disk as it seems like that would take forever.

Any ideas why this is happening. The drive is working OK some of the time so I'd have thought it must be physically OK. Was wondering if it was a problem with the way Windows sees it, files permissions or something.

Many thanks for your help.

John

Write speed

Run this........Speccy - Free Download

Now do this and post a link.......Speccy...publish

 

[John McMullin]

Thanks for this:

http://speccy.piriform.com/results/JHyRKAqFwUaqY0qqbX8koSm

 

[Bob.B]

Thanks for this:

http://speccy.piriform.com/results/JHyRKAqFwUaqY0qqbX8koSm

A few problems.

Both seagate disk are junk.......too many errors.
Rpld asap.

All the disk are too hot.
Work on the cooling.

Enable xmp and bump the ram to 3200 speed.

 

[fzabkar]

Neither Seagate drive has recorded any seek errors, command timeouts, reallocated sectors, pending sectors or uncorrectable sectors. The raw values of the Read Error Rate are sector counts, not error counts.

You could use HDDScan to run a surface scan on each drive. HDDScan will report any "slow" sectors, ie those sectors which require read retries.

 

[John McMullin]

Thanks for both of your help. Bob, good to get the great advice on memory speed, cooling problems and possible errors on the drives. Fzabkar, are you saying that you think that the drives might be OK? Could there be another cause of the problem?

I'm just trying to decide what route to take.

The two Seagate drives are relatively new, so I'm a bit disappointed to hear that they might be causing problems. I guess they should be under warranty still.

I decided to stripe two large drives to give me speed and a lot of room for large video files. But given what has happened, maybe I should find a different storage solution. If it's the heat causing the problem, my case has space for three 3.5 hard drives and they look a bit sandwiched on top of each other. although there is a fan just in front of them. I was trying to avoid buying an external raid.

 

[fzabkar]

I'm just saying that the SMART reports don't show any problems.

 

[Bob.B]

Thanks for both of your help. Bob, good to get the great advice on memory speed, cooling problems and possible errors on the drives. Fzabkar, are you saying that you think that the drives might be OK? Could there be another cause of the problem?

I'm just trying to decide what route to take.

The two Seagate drives are relatively new, so I'm a bit disappointed to hear that they might be causing problems. I guess they should be under warranty still.

I decided to stripe two large drives to give me speed and a lot of room for large video files. But given what has happened, maybe I should find a different storage solution. If it's the heat causing the problem, my case has space for three 3.5 hard drives and they look a bit sandwiched on top of each other. although there is a fan just in front of them. I was trying to avoid buying an external raid.

Fzabkar is correct.
Seagate has their own method of posting smart data.
My error.

 

[John McMullin]

Thanks. So I'm doing a scan with Victoria 5.35 software. It's going to take all day to do both drives.

 

[John McMullin]

The scans have completed and I get no warning, no errors. Just one green block on both drives. Status good.

Seems like the drives are OK but they seem to run hot some of the time. Could it be that that's causing the write speed to go so low. The fact that they are striped together might cause more problems with writing to the disks.

 

[Bob.B]

The scans have completed and I get no warning, no errors. Just one green block on both drives. Status good.

Seems like the drives are OK but they seem to run hot some of the time. Could it be that that's causing the write speed to go so low. The fact that they are striped together might cause more problems with writing to the disks.

Heat/write speed.
The only way your going to tell is to cool the hdd's and test.
If no help unstripe and test.

 

[John McMullin]

I've taken both sides off the computer and have been working like that for a few hours. Did some large copies back on to the media drive from my backup.

It's been much better. One time the copy froze and I had to quit out but since then it hasn't failed. The Victoria program I downloaded says that the two drives are running at 64 and 58 degrees which isn't much different from before but maybe they were actually suffering worse than indicated.

So I feel it must be something to do with the temperature. My mATX case is designed with the front fan blowing into a water cooler radiator. There is also a top fan cooling the graphics card mainly I'd imagine. The hard drives are stacked on top of each other at the bottom of the case, behind the radiator and in front of the power supply. Doesn't seem like a good way to get them cool.