Question Why is this HDD so slow?

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
20,927
16,176
136
WD Green HDDs have a rep for being slow, but I would like to understand why (at least by looking at the specs); this drive isn't much slower than I expect for a WD Green of its age.

Take for example this drive: WD15EARS.
Trying to find some decent (and hopefully accurate) specs is tricky, for example this site:
I suspect is either AI-fuelled or maybe a bunch of data lazily slurped from different sources because the "failure symptoms" information is either very generic or so generic that it's as good as junk.

The SMART data looks fine, but the write performance of the drive is as poor as I would expect from a WD Green 3.5" drive, so in this case a 1.5TB drive that is probably averaging about 45MB/sec write performance (I saw it peaking at about 65MB/sec so logically it has a USB3 link) via USB3 for large enough files to get its teeth into. If I picked a random 2.5" old 500GB/1TB drive from my collection, I'd expect to write ~100MB/sec via USB3.

Any ideas?
 

Santa Lurks

Junior Member
Oct 8, 2025
1
0
6

WD15EARS is only the first half of the model number before the hyphen, and there are multiple variants. The one I found was 7200RPM so spindle speed wasn't the culprit (5400RPM or lower is often found). 64MB cache is good, so that isn't it, either. I suspect the drive therefore uses SMR (DMSMR) which makes the drive horrendously slower in order to pack more capacity per platter


 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
20,927
16,176
136
Full model number, copied and pasted direct from Linux: WDC WD15EARS-60MVWB0

I haven't seen any typical indicators that it's SMR (e.g. the drive needs to stop and have a rest after a long write), I think it's older than that.
 

sdifox

No Lifer
Sep 30, 2005
100,147
17,876
126