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Sudden drop in performance // WD Black Scorpio 2.5

E

erasermusic

Junior Member
Hello,

I have just bought WD Black Scorpio 750 GB / 2.5" and installed it to replace my old failing hard drive.
Yesterday, after a fresh W7 install, I benchmarked it in ATTO and CrystalDiskmark.
It scored exactly the same as in this review
http://www.legitreviews.com/wd-scorpio-black-750gb-notebook-hard-drive-review_1658/7

today, after installing few programs, recovering some backups... I managed to test it again.
now, it scored :

only 116 MB/s in sequential read ! (previously 128MB/s)

The other values dropped in similar margin. Please note that :

- I have ran the test MANY times to ensure measurement error
- none of applications were running
- I have restarted the laptop several times
- none of services were running in the backround (except the system ones)
- hard drive was just defragmented today (0.57% fragmentation)
- 127 GB is occupied, 570 GB free
- maximum performance power plan

My question is - is this normal ? The system is responsive (ironically, more responsive than yesterday), but still. Shall I trust this drive ?

thank you.
 
Why wouldn't you trust it, is it throwing SMART errors ? (Check with crystaldiskinfo)
The more the drive fills up, then the slower certain operations can get, in that, stuff written at the beginning would be faster than stuff written at the end.

That means, that if you were to format the HD again, you would most likely see your numbers return.

Here is a graph that shows what is going on...
hdtune-line-read.gif
 
Yeah, the HD fills the fastest parts of the drive (outer edges) first, so the benchmark on an empty drive will always be faster than on one that is filled.
 
Thank you guys, this is what I've been hoping for. No SMART errors so far.

But strange thing happened. I have benchmarked it in the morning and ATTO performance was back to 124-128 MB/s !!

Ironically, the hard drive is more filled than yesterday (146 GB vs 127 GB). So... can be the performance drop caused by overheating ? Or something like that ?
The worst temperature so far was 43 degress (109 fahrenheit).
 
All it needs is for some service/app to request data while you're running a benchmark and a significant performance drop could be reported. If you started consistently getting readings of say a fifth of the original performance (and you've ruled out background activity), then IMO that would be worrying and would warrant further investigation.

I doubt that heat on its own would reduce performance unless the drive had something in its design to reduce performance in order to reduce heat build-up. IMO too much heat isn't good for a drive. A notebook drive is rarely well ventilated, so that temperature reading is what I would expect it to be.

One other thing, benchmarking your drive stresses it out. Once I had tested the drive once and received results within expectations, if nothing untoward had occurred since, I would assume the drive is working correctly.
 
Part of the fill can be Indexing, MFT Reserved Zone and System Restore. If Hibernation is enabled, that is more fill. Agree with Mikeymikec regarding benchmarking.
 
Thank you for your input guys.

I have tested the drive at the end of the day... and it got 119.8 MB/s in ATTO. Considering that the drive is filled even more (164 GB) I guess I shouldn't be concerned about it anymore.
System was responsive all day long. In case something pop-ups, I will let you know. But I would he happy if it does not.

Thanks for all help.
 
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