WD Blue 2TB HDD Slow

[ThinkPad560X]

I got 2 Western Digital Blue 2TB HDDs at the store for $54.00. While I have a 1TB WD Blue HDD in a few PCs they run fine and a few WD Blue 1TB SSDs. It seems the 2TB runs very sluggish, can hear the read arm accessing the data. I didn't know if the 2TB HDDs may run slower due to probably more platters as it's another 1000GB. But I had Windows 10 64bit on the drive and it ran very slow. Took at least 5-7 sec for the start bar to come up after clicking the windows icon. Browser click was the same thing. So, I wiped the drive and installed Windows 7 64bit on the machine as it is a windows 7 last gen era PC before going to 8. It ran smooth and fast but now it is slow after trying to open a program once all the updates are installed. I ran CrystaldickMark and got these results.

Read (MB/s) Write (MB/s)
SEQ1M Q8T1 202.28 | 194.19
SEQ1M Q1T1 197.57 | 193.78
RND4K Q32T1 1.60 |15.24
RND4K Q1T1 0.95 | 11.07

[dr_st]

Those speeds look fine. Spinning drives have been around the 200MB/s mark for sequential access for some time, but random access is terrible. Windows 10 is optimized for SSDs, not spinning drives. It will always perform poorly on rotational media.

[TPFanatic]

I wonder if SMR technology is effecting the perceivable speed.

[axur-delmeria]

I run HD Tune's benchmark.


(reference image from the website)

The blue line graph shows the read speed from the hard drive as the program does a sweep across the entire disk area.
The yellow dots show the access time of said areas.
The reference image shows a fairly normal hard drive.

A problematic disk would show dips on the blue line graph, and horrendous access times in certain areas.

[Jake.Werecat]

I used to have a 2.5" WD Blue 2TB HDD for ~5 years. It was slow, yet reliable. I used it for data storage only, so speed wasn't a very important factor to me (OS was running from a separate smaller SSD) and I took it for granted that 5400RPM 2.5" HDD is slow out of its nature. I got rid of that WD recently in favor of 4TB Samsung SSD which is my only drive now. Hell yea, that's night and day Highly recommend it to anyone, especially these days with SSD being almost dirt cheap.

[unix_joe]

I used to have a 2.5 WD Blue 2TB for ~5 years. They were slow, yet reliable. I used it for data storage only so speed wasn't a very important factor to me (OS was running from a separate smaller SSD) and I took it for granted that 5400RPM 2.5 HDDs are slow out of its nature. I got rid of that WD recently in favor of 4TB SSD which is my only drive now. Hell yea, that's a night and day Highly recommend it to anyone, especially these days with SSD being almost dirt cheap.

Best of both worlds is a 4TB WD Blue SSD. I guess I've been on the Western Digital train for too long. At least since 2009 or so with their platter drives, so I went with WD for my SSD. 17 months now and it's been working fine no problem. They also make green branded SSD's, one of which is in my daughter's computer.

[theterminator93]

Keep in mind the WD product lines.

WD Green - entry level product for low duty cycle applications.
WD Blue - mainstream consumer product.
WD Black - high performance.
WD Red - optimized for low duty cycle RAID arrays (such as a NAS), with a reduced tolerance for error recovery.
WD Gold - enterprise grade. Similar to red but with higher performance and speeds.
WD Purple - Optimized for continuous use in surveillance.

[axur-delmeria]

My most recent HDD purchase is a 4TB WD Red Plus (the one that isn't SMR). Pretty OK for now.

[Jake.Werecat]

I really like WD for HDDs, but they're not leading when it comes to SSD drives. I use Samsung SSD almost since they appeared on the martket.

Also as for 2.5" WD HDD - there isn't much choice. I've never seen a 2TB model other then Blue series. No Black or Reds unfortunately.

[ThinkPad560X]

I have 2 WD Blue 1TB SSDs and a WD Blue 500GB SSD. The 1TB I got at store for $109 and the 500GB was $59. I picked up 2 WD Blue 2TB HDDs as they were $49 a piece, not on same day but cheap for a 2TB HDD now. I probably plan to get one of those WD Black 4TB SSD for PC gaming. If I remember I think it was $250.

I was thinking of gutting out my 1997 IBM Aptiva 2140 Full tower. Not mine ( https://picclick.com/IBM-Aptiva-Compute ... id=1&pid=1 ) Has a Pentium II MMX and a first Gen DVD-ROM drive. The power supply died and was thinking of installing a new motherboard in it (still keeping the old board if ever want it back in it)