HDD tranfer speeds

[Mulligan]

My 18 month old Octane Laptop (see sig for specs) has just developed a HD issue. When transferring large files (anything above 700mb) from an external HD to the 1tb Seagate SATA the transfer rate will frequently drop to essentially zero half way through the transfer. It's been a couple months since I last transferred large files so I'm not sure when it begun but I know it has previously been fine.

The speed will normally start anywhere between 80mb/s-110mb/s and remain fairly consistent until it suddenly plummets and says it's going at 1mb/s but in reality has stopped completely. Files below about 700mb seem fine as the transfer completes before the slowdown, but any larger file sizes will be effected about 60% of the time.

I can transfer from the external HD to my internal SSD drive without any issues, so presumably the issue cannot be due to the external.

I've run Win10 disk tools and Seagate HD tools (SeaTools for Windows) and no errors were found.

HD Drive:
1TB SEAGATE 7mm SERIAL ATA III 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 128MB CACHE (7,200rpm)

Can anyone recommend any tests or fixes I could try?

Thanks!

 

[Grumpywurzel]

Does it ever complete the transfer or does it completely fail?

 

[SpyderTracks]

My 18 month old Octane Laptop (see sig for specs) has just developed a HD issue. When transferring large files (anything above 700mb) from an external HD to the 1tb Seagate SATA the transfer rate will frequently drop to essentially zero half way through the transfer. It's been a couple months since I last transferred large files so I'm not sure when it begun but I know it has previously been fine.

The speed will normally start anywhere between 80mb/s-110mb/s and remain fairly consistent until it suddenly plummets and says it's going at 1mb/s but in reality has stopped completely. Files below about 700mb seem fine as the transfer completes before the slowdown, but any larger file sizes will be effected about 60% of the time.

I can transfer from the external HD to my internal SSD drive without any issues, so presumably the issue cannot be due to the external.

I've run Win10 disk tools and Seagate HD tools (SeaTools for Windows) and no errors were found.

HD Drive:
1TB SEAGATE 7mm SERIAL ATA III 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 128MB CACHE (7,200rpm)

Can anyone recommend any tests or fixes I could try?

Thanks!

If you go into disk manager and find the seagate drive, what partition type is it as? So in the below image my "disk 1" is as NTFS

 

[Mulligan]

Does it ever complete the transfer or does it completely fail?

I've left it a couple times for about 20 min and it doesn't seem to go anywhere (this is for files of 3Gb at most), I can try leaving it for longer to see if it eventually completes or fails.

If you go into disk manager and find the seagate drive, what partition type is it as? So in the below image my "disk 1" is as NTFS

The disk at issue is Disk 0, so it's NTFS, see below.
Disk 1 is the SSD I boot from and seems fine.

 

[ubuysa]

Can you post the current SMART data from that HDD please?

 

[SpyderTracks]

Can you post the current SMART data from that HDD please?

You can use CrystalDiskInfo standard version for smart data:

CrystalDiskInfo

About CrystalDiskInfo A HDD/SSD utility software which supports a part of USB, Intel RAID and NVMe. Aoi Edition Standard Edition Shizuku Edition Kurei Kei Edition Download System Requirements OS Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10/11Windows Server 2003/2008/2012/2016/2019/2022 Architecture x86/x64/ARM64...

crystalmark.info

 

[ubuysa]

And in addition, how full is that HDD and what's the fragmentation like?

 

[Mulligan]

Can you post the current SMART data from that HDD please?

I think I've picked out the pertinent data but let me know if you need the entire file that CrystalDiskInfo outputs:

Model : ST1000LM049-2GH172
Firmware : SDM1
Serial Number : WGS3RSLL
Disk Size : 1000.2 GB (8.4/137.4/1000.2/1000.2)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 1953525168
Rotation Rate : 7200 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ACS-3
Minor Version : ACS-3 Revision 3b
Transfer Mode : SATA/600 | SATA/600
Power On Hours : 10567 hours
Power On Count : 90 count
Temperature : 53 C (127 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ, TRIM
APM Level : 8080h [ON]
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter : D:

-- S.M.A.R.T. --------------------------------------------------------------
ID Cur Wor Thr RawValues(6) Attribute Name
01 _80 _64 __6 000006A23F08 Read Error Rate
03 _99 _99 __0 000000000000 Spin-Up Time
04 100 100 _20 00000000005B Start/Stop Count
05 100 100 _36 000000000000 Reallocated Sectors Count
07 _79 _60 _45 000004568DA9 Seek Error Rate
09 _88 _88 __0 0BED00002947 Power-On Hours
0A 100 100 _97 000000000000 Spin Retry Count
0C 100 100 _20 00000000005A Power Cycle Count
B8 100 100 _99 000000000000 End-to-End Error
BB 100 100 __0 000000000000 Reported Uncorrectable Errors
BC 100 100 __0 000000000000 Command Timeout
BD 100 100 __0 000000000000 High Fly Writes
BE _47 _34 _40 19AF40220035 Airflow Temperature
BF 100 100 __0 000000000000 G-Sense Error Rate
C0 100 100 __0 000000000004 Power-off Retract Count
C1 _90 _90 __0 000000004E30 Load/Unload Cycle Count
C2 _53 _66 __0 000E00000035 Temperature
C5 100 100 __0 000000000000 Current Pending Sector Count
C6 100 100 __0 000000000000 Uncorrectable Sector Count
C7 200 200 __0 000000000000 UltraDMA CRC Error Count
F0 100 253 __0 E8A200002671 Head Flying Hours
F1 100 253 __0 0003A23319E0 Total Host Writes
F2 100 253 __0 0003AB6073D3 Total Host Reads
FE 100 100 __0 000000000000 Free Fall Protection

And in addition, how full is that HDD and what's the fragmentation like?

164Gb free out of 931Gb. 1% fragmentation which Win says Ok.

 

[ubuysa]

There is nothing obviously wrong in there, though the Seek Error Rate is higher than I'd like to see. This indicates a mechanical issue whereby the heads don't land properly on the requires cylinder, but it's not huge and unlikely to be the cause of your copy issues I think. In particular the Reallocated Sector Count and the Reported Uncorrectable Error Count are both zero, and that's very good news.

Later edit: Another number that does look odd is the Queue Depth at 32, if that's the actual queue depth for that drive then something else is accessing the drive. You generally don't want queue depth of more than 2 or 3 on an HDD. If you know how to use the Performance Monitor track the Physical Disk\Current Disk Queue Length counter for that drive whilst you do a big copy. If you've not used the performance monitor before have a look at https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/forums/threads/using-the-performance-monitor.60203/. Unfortunately there isn't any other way to see the queue depth. However, the Resource Monitor, which is easier to use, will show you the processes that are access that disk at the same time - click on the Disk tab and watch what's using the drive as you do a large copy.

What tool are you using to do the copy?

 

[Mulligan]

What tool are you using to do the copy?

I'm just using the native copy feature (i.e. drag and drop). Years ago I used TeraCopy but with Win10 it seemed the native copy was good enough.

I've run Performace Monitor while copying a file (I've found the same issue occurs when copying between internal SSD and internal HD so I'm just doing that for the tests). The only warning it gives is this, would this be relevant?

Severity: Informational Symptom: Missing Events in Event Log Details: Investigate why 47% (32,329) events were lost during data collection. The settings for Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) maximum buffers and buffer size may not be optimal depending on which data sets are being collected.

In the report I can't find the Physical Disk\Current Disk Queue Length counter though, my first time using perfmon, hopefully not right in front of my face! This is the breakdown of disk usage, I've expanded the section regarding the file copy:

Are there other sections I should be looking at in the report?

I've never been particularly impressed with this HD, it's always felt sluggish (eg it takes a long time to show photo previews in file explorer). I always put it down to just comparing it to using SSD predominantly in other machines but this is making me wonder if the issue is just a worsing of an underlying problem that's always been there.

Thanks for all your help working through this!

 

[Mulligan]

Still experiencing the issue. I've found that if I leave the transfer running the speed eventually (after about half hour) goes back up and completes as normal. Still not ideal that it takes so long to transfer files, would be good to hear if any ideas for further investigation/fix.

 

[ubuysa]

I'm so sorry, I somehow forgot all about this.

You need to select the current disk queue length counter and then run perfmon. If you've not used it before this may not be the best time to try and figure it out.

You might try using the Robocopy tool, it's part of Windows 10 and it's my preferred file/folder copying tool. It has a ton of options, you can find all the details about it at https://adamtheautomator.com/robocopy-the-ultimate/#Common_Robocopy_Syntax_Reference or you could of course just issue the robocopy /? command to see the syntax.