[HELP]Abhorently slow write speeds on a brand new drive

Hey, so basically I got a new Seagate Barracuda drive like few days ago with a product code: st2000dm008. The initial speeds were good, as far as I can tell with my lack of experience, though they dropped by over a half in write speeds after i moved some stuff over to the given drive.

What I’ve done so far:

  • Changed out the SATA port and cable.
  • Updated the BIOS of my motherboard to latest version.
  • Ran all the tests on SeaTools, which all passed.
  • Checked the status of the drive with Crystal Disk Info, which also looks good to me, at least.
  • Ran chkdsk through command line in Windows.
  • Defragged the drive

Screenshots of different statistics provided below:

Information of the given drive

Results before the problem.

Results after it occurred.

Also including the speeds of my SSD, just to compare and see if that’s faulty as well, I really don’t know personally.

I really don’t know what to make out of any of this, honestly. So I hope that anyone here finds time to diagnose it or give any pointers.
Thank you for your time.

HDD as SSD always slows down when it is full. HDD has a linear drop usually, not like yours hdd.
SSD, on the other hand, has a drastic drop above a certain %, especially in cheap ssd.

Delete the data if you have the option and check again. If it is still slow, it may be a more serious problem …

Cheap ssd at 55%.
cssd

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I do know that the speed drops as you fill the drive more and more. Pay attention to before and after pics and the capacity within them though. It was literally 20GB difference. I do remember doing a defrag and optimize thing inside of disk defragment in the Windows tool itself between both runs.
So I’m suspecting that doing it somehow killed the performance, although I don’t see how.
I am currently moving some folders to other drives to test if the speed goes back up once i empty some amount of it, I’ll update you once it’s done.

PS.

I hope the formatting of my text isn’t hard to read.

96MB/s is not horrible for rust. I’d expect more like 140, but you are on NTFS.

I’m not sure what a normal loss in write speed would be. Having used a Seagate Barracuda myself I’ve never experienced a loss in write speed this drastic. Have you tried copying a large file to the drive instead of using the benchmark? Perhaps the benchmark is flawed.

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@SgtAwesomesauce 96MB/s isn’t indeed that bad, but it’s more about the fact that it dropped so drastically out of nowhere.

@Crystal_Labs I made a 10GB dummy file that I copy-pasted from one directory to another in the same drive. I will be providing more links below.

This was yesterday when it still advertised 200MB/s read-write.

This is right now, after removing another 200GB of data from the drive.

Somehow it got worse. I’m not sure if I’m the one being a dummy here or if there’s actually something going on.

I pay attention … I wrote “HDD has a linear drop usually, not like yours hdd”.
You have a sudden drop with a 1% difference, which is not that typical.

Since you are sure that the drive does not slow down due to filling up, look for reasons elsewhere.
Defragmentation should have nothing to do with it. Make sure that the drive is not actually in use. If there is no active indexing process since this is fresh content on the hdd.

Just go with the elimination method step by step to exclude any potential factor.

I did have resource monitor open at the time and I checked if there was anything else using the drive and the answer is no. I’m not sure if that’s what you meant.

256MB of cache could help to artificially stimulate those write speeds when you first tested it. NTFS isn’t very smart when it comes to placing files on a disk.

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More or less.

And how about free RAM? From observations I remember that on some Windows, in the absence of free RAM there were sometimes drops in the speed of writing.

@SgtAwesomesauce Are you basically saying that the speeds I’m getting aren’t that surprising then? I could also take it back to the store and see what do they have to say about this.

@TimHolus I have about 11GB free at all times, give or take.

Maybe NTFS starts going crazy. Give him the full format.
Also try the newer CrystalDiskMark. And preferably “ATTO Disk Benchmark”.
Test ext4 with some live distro instead of ntfs.

for a 7200rpm drive, not really surprising. I remember when I was happy with 20mb/s writes for 7200rpm disks.

If you want to, you can, but personally, I’d put a call into seagate and ask them about it, rather than the store.

@TimHolus I did the new CDM and also ATTO at its default settings since I don’t know what I’m doing.


I’ll figure out the Linux stuff later, since it’s getting late.

@SgtAwesomesauce I wrote to Seagate just moments ago, so we’ll see what do they have to say about the situation.

I’m going to bed now, so don’t expect a reply till tomorrow, probably. Thanks for your help thus far.

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I’ve seen some reports that Seagate might have switched most of the Barracuda (non-Pro) line of drives over to Shingled Magnetic Recording, which would lead to write speeds dropping sharply sooner or later. Looking at the official data sheet does not say that, but that also lacks some data like even the rotational speed of the platters. Another rumor suggests they migh have gone down to 5400 RPM as well and it’s just the retailers information that mentions 7200 anymore.

Manufacturers of spinning rust are in a hard place at least on the consumer side. I would not be surprised if this is true.

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These numbers are about right for a drive that is shingled … when writing a non zerod area it has to read in a bit and rewrite it. With deleting stuff you may have some fragmentation … you could try a defrag to get your write speed back.

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ATTO looks rather “ok”. Most samples are above 100.

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I have yet to go to bed, insomnia is being pretty rude these days.

@mkk I assume “spinning rust” stands for just a mechanical drive in this case. I believe the datasheet called my drive being 7200RPM, though I don’t really know the terminology of storage that well so you might be referring to something else.

@wendell The major slowdown happened after a defrag though, so I don’t know what’s up with that. There’s always a possibility that it was never in correlation with the slowdown, though I don’t know.

@TimHolus I assume I don’t even need to poke around with the ext4 drive benchmark then?

Also I did some googling and people do guess that the drive is shingled, which sucks for me big time. Anyhow I assume we’re done here?

Depends on you. Personally, I’d rather do tests in my spare time. You never know. Then you will be 100% sure.
You can always try to get the full fromat or zeroing of the surface.

Personally, I do not know the specifics of this particular hdd, but if people provide specific information, then …

For a loose comparison one of my SAMSUNG HD502HJ
SAMSUNG%20HD502HJ
SAMSUNG%20HD502HJ%202

I have a similar drive and I get the same speeds as in your first screenshot, around 200mb/s at best. Have you tried creating a seperate partition formated differently? Maybe exFAT?.
Your write speed is so gimped it looks like you have ntfs compression enabled or something.
btw I’m using ntfs on my drive and it works fine.