Strange disc performance
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Narcisus

Original Poster:

9,094 posts

311 months

Monday 16th September 2019
quotequote all
Well this is a weird one for me ...

Just built a new system with 2 new 6tb Barracudas and 4 old drives from my old system. 3 2tb Barracudas and a 3tb WD.

So need to copy my docs folder to new 6tb drive. Folder is about 1.8tb.

Start copy and at first all is well and it’s running around 130mb/s but after around 10 mins performance starts to fall off and the new drive hits 100% activity with a transfer rate zero to around 3 and stays there with the very odd peak..Old drive that is the source stays at around 20% or even lower.

It’s a fresh win 10 install. No antivirus yet. Tried stopping search and creating a new page file just in case but with 32gb memory utilisation is pretty low anyway.

Interesting if you stop the copy the new drive continues to write for some time... Almost like it’s filling a buffer the emptying the buffer until you restart the copy and process starts again.

bunchofkeys

1,306 posts

99 months

Monday 16th September 2019
quotequote all
How are the disc connected to each other/to the MB?

Take a look at the motherboard manual, and see how the SATA lines are setup, it could be that you're saturating one the lines, and so things grind to a halt.
Move the disc on to another SATA port, and it may be ok.

Narcisus

Original Poster:

9,094 posts

311 months

Monday 16th September 2019
quotequote all
bunchofkeys said:
How are the disc connected to each other/to the MB?

Take a look at the motherboard manual, and see how the SATA lines are setup, it could be that you're saturating one the lines, and so things grind to a halt.
Move the disc on to another SATA port, and it may be ok.
Worth a try. There are 4 6gb ports at the bottom and 4 6gb ports on the right of the board below atx connector.

The 2 new 6tb drives are connected to 2 of the bottom ports and the 3 older drives below the atx connector.

It’s very strange ! Watching it again now and disc activity on the source disk has dropped to 1 or 2% while the new destination disk is stuck at 100% !

I’ll try the same thing but writing to the other new disk and see if that does the same.

Narcisus

Original Poster:

9,094 posts

311 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
Ok update on this for anyone who might be interested...

The reason they are grinding to a halt is they are SME drives ! Didn’t say anything about this when in purchased them. Guess I should have done more research !

Anyway I’ve decided to keep them as archive drives and will buy a nice fast drive for gaming !

Anyone recommend a drive ? Looked at 2tb ssd’s but they are a bit expensive. Hybrid drive ? I have a 1tb Evo 970 that I can stick the odd game on if needed.


snuffy

13,433 posts

315 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
Narcisus said:
The reason they are grinding to a halt is they are SME drives ! Didn’t say anything about this when in purchased them. Guess I should have done more research !
What's an SME drive ? I've never heard on such a thing and Professor Google doesn't know either.

Narcisus

Original Poster:

9,094 posts

311 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
Professor Google cant make up for my knackered late night typing !

Here you go :

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/57eo...

snuffy

13,433 posts

315 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
Ah, I see.

I'd not heard of an SMR drive either but now I see what they are.

The thing with hybrid drives as that they are not really a hybrid (i.e. cross). They are a big HDD and a small SSD in one that appear as a single drive. The idea is that the drive's firmware decides what data is being accessed frequently and puts that data on the SSD part. SO if you are wanting to copy large amounts of data to a hybrid that it's makes no difference at all.

anonymous-user

85 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
Just get 1tb ssds. Cheap price point. Price / performance ration is exceptional.

I've got no spinning discs in my PC any more. They are reserved for my raid nas storage.

Narcisus

Original Poster:

9,094 posts

311 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
RogerDodger said:
Just get 1tb ssds. Cheap price point. Price / performance ration is exceptional.

I've got no spinning discs in my PC any more. They are reserved for my raid nas storage.
Yeah I have another M2 slot free and 2 nice mount points for SSD's.... Trouble is ( this is sad ) I need it for Flight Simulator and my full install hits about 1.5Tb !

Just looking at the Seagate FireCuda which is a hybrid. Looks like it gets decent results compared to standard mechanical drives.... Cant be any slower than my 8 year old 2Tb which I would use otherwise ! It's only about 70 quid.

Intel 660p Series 2TB M.2 Looks attractive but I dont really want to have to explain to the Mrs that i've spent another £200 after forking out 2k on the new machine !

Edit to say... Did a robocopy job last night from one drive to one of the SMR drives and it appeared to be copying a lot faster than just dragging from drive to drive.

Edited by Narcisus on Tuesday 17th September 12:49

anonymous-user

85 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
Even an SSD with "average" specs will trounce any HDD by a long way. Your flight sim will love it.

Nothing to be ashamed of. Spent lots of time on MS flight sim in the past.

Narcisus

Original Poster:

9,094 posts

311 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
RogerDodger said:
Even an SSD with "average" specs will trounce any HDD by a long way. Your flight sim will love it.

Nothing to be ashamed of. Spent lots of time on MS flight sim in the past.
Agreed but its the price point lol ! I've been using SSD's since the 64Gb days so i'm a convert however I dont want to see my spherical's on a cocktail stick which is what would happen if I spent 200 nicker on one.....

And it would have to be 2Tb for the FS install :-(

The_Jackal

4,854 posts

228 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
I was going to suggest copy smaller folders a few at a time rather than do nearly 2Tb in one operation.
Your other option would be to use robocopy. It copies direct to source, has error checking and is much faster than Windows copying.

snuffy

13,433 posts

315 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
The_Jackal said:
I was going to suggest copy smaller folders a few at a time rather than do nearly 2Tb in one operation.
I was going to suggest that - i.e. copy a few folders at a time. It seems to copy quicker but it might be my imagination 1

Narcisus

Original Poster:

9,094 posts

311 months

Tuesday 17th September 2019
quotequote all
The_Jackal said:
I was going to suggest copy smaller folders a few at a time rather than do nearly 2Tb in one operation.
Your other option would be to use robocopy. It copies direct to source, has error checking and is much faster than Windows copying.
wink Yup did that a couple of posts up.

' Did a robocopy job last night from one drive to one of the SMR drives and it appeared to be copying a lot faster than just dragging from drive to drive. '