Super slow HDDs

[Stephen Coates]

I've had a 4TB Seagate IronWolf HDD for about 5 years now (it has about 4 years on the power-on clock). It uses 'conventional magnetic recording' and has very good performance. Not as good as an NVME SSD but good enough for working with large video files.

In 2022 I bought one of the cheaper 4TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs. These use 'shingled magnetic recording' to cram more data on one platter, at the expense of slower write speeds, as when the drive is full, it may have to 'rearrange' the data to make it fit. I originally used this as a backup drive - I just copied a load of data on to it (took all day), then just left the drive sitting in a cupboard.

I now decided to install it permanently in my computer so I can use it to store 'less important' data.

I copied over 100GB of data from a small (full) SSD and it took a few hours. I then realised I copied it to the wrong partition on the Barracuda, and copied it from one partition to another and it took 14 hours.

I just did a benchmark test and it averaged a 1.9MB/s write speed. And the read speed wasn't much better at 11MB/s. WTF? Contrast this to the IronWolf which manages a write speed of 112MB/s and a read speed of 124MB/s.

Barracuda:
barracuda_benchmark.png

IronWolf:
ironwolf_benchmark.png

[Harrison]

You need to check the drive for bad sectors or fragmentation. If it's formatted to NTFS it might also be worth considering reformatting it to ExFAT.

[Stephen Coates]

I swapped a few parts around in the computer and now it seems to be working fine, so I suspect either I've got a dodgy SATA cable, or it wasn't plugged in right. Although I'd have thought in that case it might not have worked at all.

barracuda_benchmark_good.png

I'm running badblocks on it to fill the drive with data and read it back just to make sure but I think it will be fine.

[Harrison]

That's good if it was just a cable that fixed it. Like you say, it's strange it still worked.

[Stephen Coates]

Well, badblocks was able to write and read the entire drive with no issues, so I think its safe to say the speed issues in the first post were just some sort of glitch. Everything seems to be working now, and I now have 2x4TB of HDD space. Now to reorganise the data...