HGST Drive Odd Results (Solved)

[BlitzPuppet]

Revisiting my HGST 3TB Purchase https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Deskstar-3-5-Inch-Internal-0S03660/dp/B00HHAJU7K

Machine Specs:
i7 4690K 4Ghz
16GB RAM
MSI Gaming 7 Z97 controller (all tested drives running on this one and not the asmedia)
https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Deskstar-3-5-Inch-Internal-0S03660/dp/B00HHAJU7K
First drive had wonky HGST/CrystalDiskMark results...contacted tech support and they said to wipe the drive in all 0s and try to speed test again...wiping failed halfway through with a bad sector so the drive I got was indeed bad. RMA'd bad drive on the 8th and got the replacement this past Monday. No cross ship and very slow to ship after receipt of my drive.

Got the replacement and expected to see different results. Immediately did a wipe with 0's as the support had requested and did my speed tests. What an odd little drive...definitely not getting the 150MB/s that the reviewers have posted pictures of, but that's either the fault of my chipset or my disks as none of my spinning platters achieve that speed.

Tests:
HGST (2 Partitions, test on first partition. 2nd partition is slower on a comparison I ran) Very odd that the writes are always faster in tests than reads.

My old WD 1TB Black (32mb cache) that I was hoping to replace

HGST HDTune Read Tests. This graph is ALWAYS this choppy on the drive...very odd.

Old WD Black 1TB I was hoping to replace with the HGST

Below is a sample of an SSD drive on the same Z97 chipset just to show it's happily chugging along

Is it just me/my system or is this just a subpar drive? I understand it was a NAS drive but the benchmarks in the reviews left me expecting more.

 

[Elixer]

That don't look right at all, something is up with that HD.

is pretty bad, it shouldn't be doing that.
Try a new cable as well.
I would format the sucker again (regular quick format), no partitions, and do the test again. If same results, RMA it once again.

 

[C1]

A possibility is that the drive partition is not properly aligned (as classically that results in slow read/writes).

Download the appropriate HGST tool and test the drive's alignment before re-testing.

 

[BlitzPuppet]

That don't look right at all, something is up with that HD.

is pretty bad, it shouldn't be doing that.
Try a new cable as well.
I would format the sucker again (regular quick format), no partitions, and do the test again. If same results, RMA it once again.

I'll try another cable when I get home. I got the same results on a fresh format and no partitions. Very annoying .

A possibility is that the drive partition is not properly aligned (as classically that results in slow read/writes).

Download the appropriate HGST tool and test the drive's alignment before re-testing.

I'll try using WinDFT again tonight but won't expect any different results. No idea why this drive AND the previous one both have that crazy graph chatter. My WD Green is even faster than this drive.

 

[BlitzPuppet]

Ran WinDFT last night. Aborted the first time to shut down for a thunderstorm. When that passed I ran the extended test over night and everything passed?

 

[Elixer]

Ran WinDFT last night. Aborted the first time to shut down for a thunderstorm. When that passed I ran the extended test over night and everything passed?

The test is pretty basic, it doesn't do anything advanced.
Your problem seems to be controller related.

 

[Elixer]

BTW, if you open up task manager, performance tab, does the drive spike to 100% during the tests?

 

[BlitzPuppet]

BTW, if you open up task manager, performance tab, does the drive spike to 100% during the tests?

Yes, I'm seeing the disk in task manager/resource monitor at 100%, along with confirming that is the only thing running on that drive through resource manager.

I only have a USB 2.0 to usb laying around here, but I may try it just to see how the drive reacts when plugged into my work laptop. I'll try this in the AM

 

[Elixer]

In another post, https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/solved-spinpoint-f3-1tb-poor-performace.2382333/#post-36350022 they had a program interfere with the drive, and it had a similar graph to what yours is doing.
Might want to check what else is running that could cause that.

 

[MongGrel]

The free version of HD Tune is pretty old, like 2008.

2.55 it looks like your using that to begin with. It does not seem very accurate for some drives these days to me, I get very different results with a few things on a few of my arrays.

HD Tune on the two little Sammy SSD's in RAID0 will show a transfer rate of about 230 tops and jump all over, but they show around about 3X that fast in others.

Granted, 10-80 looks bad.

 

[BlitzPuppet]

For what it's worth I JUST found out what the problem was.

After dealing with the RMA and getting the same results I kinda just gave up on the drive ever being up to par.

This weekend after doing some digging, I went ahead and did the "4k alignment" tool on Partition Master just as a last ditch effort. Well it worked...

I feel kinda dumb for not looking at this before, but I've never experienced this before and usually a windows format is all fine and dandy with my WD drives.