Really low read speeds reported by WD Black on my PC

[mikeymikec]

I didn't bother to run the whole test because a) I'm consistently getting the same result with regard to read speeds for smaller transfers and b) at the higher end it looks perfectly normal.

Board: ASUS Z97 PRO GAMER (latest BIOS)
I also have a Samsung 840 PRO 256GB SSD, but the read/write stats on that are perfectly fine.
OS: Win7 SP1 64-bit (up-to-date)

I brought both the SSD and my WD Black 1TB from my previous build (Phenom II gen), and I have saved perfectly normal ATTO readings for that drive when it was in that computer.

The WD Black is a secondary drive in my PC, just for data storage, and as far as I'm aware it works perfectly fine and quickly. The 'AS SSD' benchmark on that drive agrees with the ATTO figures, and running an elevated Process Explorer shows the same low read speeds for small transfers.

I have the feeling that the performance of this drive as reported by ATTO have been like this since I built this setup in 2015 but I didn't bother to look into it at the time as I had other things on my plate.

I've just tried updating the Intel Rapid Storage driver from 14.6 to the latest available version for this chipset which IIRC is 14.8, no difference. I also tried shutting down completely and starting up again, no diff.

SMART stats for the drive are fine, and there are no disk/ntfs/iastor errors in the event log regarding this drive. It also reports 0% defragmentation and it last ran a few days ago.

 

[UsandThem]

I don't know if this will help with your situation, but I had very low scores on my 850 EVO (on 4 actually) from using the Intel AHCI driver. Went back to standard AHCI Microsoft driver, problem solved. I don't use RAID, so I don't install Intel RST anymore.

BTW, you're sure you have the drive plugged into an Intel SATA port and not a 3rd party one like Asmedia?

 

[mikeymikec]

Nope, all ports are Intel ones. I'll try removing irst and see what happens, thanks.

 

[mikeymikec]

running on the ms ahci driver, the read speeds haven't improved.

- edit - I've just swapped out the SATA lead for that drive, no difference.

- edit 2 - I've just checked the BIOS SATA related options, hotplug is disabled for that drive (the default setting) and an option for 'Aggressive link power management' is also disabled, again the default setting. I may also try connecting the drive in question into a different SATA port, swapping it with one of the optical drives.

 

[UsandThem]

You can also download WD Data Lifeguard and make sure nothing is wrong with it since it is an older drive.

You've tried a different cable, different driver, and are going to hook it up to another SATA port, so outside of those, I am out of ideas on why it would run slow.