2TB WD Black second HDD slows to a crawl in Windows 10

I recently bought a 2TB WD Black drive to replace a failing secondary drive on my Windows 10 desktop PC. My primary/boot drive is an SDD; the WD drive is secondary/for storage. Ever since installing it, I have had a recurring problem where the WD drive will slow to a crawl - extremely slow transfer speeds and when I right-click on a large folder full of pictures and hit “properties” to count the files in it, it will take forever just to count the number and size of the files. The problem seldom happens immediately on boot (although it has a couple of times). It tends to appear after the computer has been on for a while, particularly after it has gone to sleep. Usually the drive is fine after a reboot and is fast as usual. I have tried to tinker with Windows’ power settings, setting “turn off HDD after ___ minutes of inactivity” to zero but this doesn’t seem to matter.

For additional context in case this is relevant, I had trouble initially when installing the drive finding a combination of SATA cable and SATA port on my motherboard that would allow BIOS to see the drive. For a while I had Windows seeing the drive but when I went to Task Manager–>Performance it would resolutely fail to see the drive at all. With the current SATA cable and port, Windows can see the drive but I am still having this slowdown problem.

Data Lifeguard shows no errors.

I see there is another recent thread about a 2TB WD Black secondary HDD running slowly, but I don’t think I have the same symptoms as that person. My whole PC is not slowing down, it’s just the drive itself that is painfully slow. Even when it is being slow, I can see it in task manager.

Any help would be much appreciated.

1 Like

Hi Carbolic

At UserBenchmark: WD Black 2TB (2013) WD2003FZEX

The Read Write speeds are

Min read speed is = 110MB/s
Min write speed is = 103MB/s

Average read speed = 152MB/s
Average Write speed = 147MB/s

Max read speed is = 187MB/s
Max Write speed is = 198MB/s

run chkdsk on both drives (Chkdsk X: /f X=Drive letter.)

Download CrystalDiskMark - Crystal Dew World [en]

Benchmark your SDD and then Benchmark the 2TB WD Black. If it is running slower than the specs at userbenchmark.

Try disabling all auto start up software and disable all non windows services and benchmark the drives again to rule out any software conflicts.

NotaCanada.

1 Like

Thank You for posting this! I have the same problem! I have the same setup (an ssd boot drive and at 2TB WD Black HDD for storage). The HDD will work fine for about an hour and then slow to 1 to 2 MB/s transfer speeds and sometimes even slower. I don’t know whats going on…

1 Like

Running CrystalDiskMark with its default settings, I get the following values on the HDD:

Seq Q32T1 - Read 5.95 MB/s, write 6.526 MB/s
4K Q32T1 - Read 0.147 MB/s, write 0.185 MB/s
Seq - Rad 0.838 MB/s, write 1.049 MB/s
4K - 0.003 MB/s, write 0.003 MB/s

Will try some of the other steps suggested and get back.

1 Like

Chkdsk didn’t seem to do anything.

I replaced the drive with a Seagate and, (edit) - it developed a similar problem too, although not seeming to occur as frequently. I think I have now figured out the issue. I was noticing my computer was going into hibernation mode even when the power profile was set never to hibernate. Looking at the event log I saw the following at the time of the hibernation - “The system firmware has changed the processor’s memory type range registers (MTRRs) across a sleep state transition (S4). This can result in reduced resume performance.” At around the same time was the following message - “Process C:\Program Files\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\a4\AdaptiveSleepService.exe (process ID:6572) reset policy scheme from {381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e} to {381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e}.”

If you google AdaptiveSleepService you will see a bunch of people having issues with this service. I have disabled that process and have not had my computer hibernate improperly, nor have I had the disk slowdown issue, since then. I haven’t plugged the WD drive back in to be 100% sure this will fix the problem I was having on the WD drive, but I suspect it would.

1 Like