Slow Hitachi 5K.500B

Hello everyone.

I installed my Hitachi 5K.500B in my Vaio FW today and was unpleasantly surprised by it's speed. The Vista installation process took a very long time to complete (the file expansion stage) and the performance has been somewhat lackluster.

My first thought was that I must have forgotten to install a driver. I got onto the Sony support site and grabbed some more drivers and applications (namely the Sony software, which I ignored but now have). I reinstalled the Non-RAID SATA driver just for reassurance.

I ran CrystalDiskMark 2.2 and had these results:

Before I reinstalled a bunch of the drivers


After I reinstalled some drivers and programs offered by Sony


What could be the cause of this? I still have two devices in the device manager that have the yellow exclamation icon; Base System Device (which the Sony Firmware Parser thing was supposed to address, but it must be something else) and Bluetooth Peripheral Device (which came up after I tried connecting my phone). I can't imagine the Base System Device being anything involving SATA, but I am not very well informed on the issue of hardware.

Could these slow speeds be a sign of damage and future failure, or maybe just a faulty drive? I ordered it through NewEgg so they have a 30 replacement period. I don't know how it works, or if this would qualify, but I would like to have a speedier drive before the time runs out. I looked at the benchmarks that ajreynol posted (a very informative post!) and this just does not compare. I am using this as the OS drive, though. I believe his benchmarks were while using an empty disk. Could that make such a big difference?

For reference, here is ajreynol's benchmark post.

I appreciate any insight. I'm going to keep looking around for a while but I may just end up sending it in for a replacement.

 

Run it through HDTune and let us know what you see.

You numbers should be a bit lower than the ones I posted because he results I had were with the drive in an external enclosure (thus, not hampered by OS overhead). I'd like to think the numbers shouldn't be that low.

then again, my raid 0 numbers measure out to approximately 2x those numbers in CrystalDiskMark. if that's correct, it may be fair to assume these are indeed the right numbers.

things you probably did, but might want to make sure of: disable your antivirus and have as few programs running as possible when running CDM.

I'd also like to see the results of the WD Blue's running as the C Drive. Hmmm....

 

Here is what I came up with when I ran HD Tune 2.55



I don't know what to make of these results; I have never really looked at HD Tune before. I was hopeful when I saw it starting at nearly 80 MB/s. This does look a lot more like the HD Tune results that you posted in your benchmark post.

When I was installing the drivers after the install, a lot of them were taking a while to finish. I wasn't sure if they had stalled or if it just takes forever to do. It just made me worry that something was wrong with the drive.

--

Here are the CDM 2.2 results done after the HD Tune (with Avast On-Access disabled; I don't think I had it disabled when I ran the test before).

 

My HDtune looks very similar to that... I would screen shot it, but right now I have a few tasks going and I have so many spikes.

If you're really worried, run speed fan or something and check out the SMART. Mine dropped about 7% from the time of purchase, but I think its normal. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4772792 Like that...

 

Thanks for the link. I tried Speed Fan but it didn't detect my drive for some reason.

I'm starting to feel more comfortable with the drive speeds, having seen HD Tune results that seem to match the benchmarks I have seen more closely. I'm going to run HD Tune and CDM on my XPS M1530 and see how fast that hard drive is to compare (320GB, 5400 RPM). That always seemed to be quite snappy after a fresh install of Windows. Maybe they won't be too far off from eachother. I don't know how the difference in size, among other things, would factor into things.

---

I just read a review of the drive on New Egg that mentioned some of the HD Tune results. They are very similar to what I am experiencing. I am no longer too concerned about the health of my drive. I appreciate all of the help you guys have offered. I'll have to test out the drive with some real world scenarios later on.

I guess all of my worry was for nothing after all. I'll just have to wait for the price of solid state disks to drop some more before I worry too much about faster read and write speeds.

 

In the Dell BIOS, do you have the drive set in performance mode?
or in quiet, or balance?
Set it to performance, you should see a difference

Also defragment your drive before running the test again

K-TRON

 

I wonder if Vista was doing some housekeeping when you originally ran CrystalDiskMark. Do you still get low results if you rerun the test? You could also try setting it to high priority in Task Manager.

John

 

Those transfer speeds are higher than that of my 7200rpm Seagate drive. I would say something is running in the background eating drive access and slowing stuff down more than anything. For reference here is my 7200.2 Seagate in my T60

 

21.7 ms acces time seems high for Hitachi 5K500.b

18.5 ms was posted here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=364014

 

agree. 21.7 access time? it should not be that high.

random note: I'm re-dropping my image. I found that checking the "enable advanced performance" option in the Hard Drive Properties in Device Manager made my performance take a wet dump, permanently. and by "permanently", I mean unchecking the box won't allow the benches to return to normal, and the computer booted unusually slowly afterwards. and by "wet dump" I mean my write-speed was cut in half in all tests excep the 4k test in CrystalDiskMark.

Cut smooth in half.

Idunno why, but I KNOW it was the checking of that box that caused the issue. I blew the machine away and dropped the image earlier, ran my benches, then re-ran the benches after I checked the box again just to verify the issue.

For now, I recommend that people running raid 0 do not check "enable advanced performance". Performance will degrade and force you to correct somehow. the format and re-imaging was the easy way for me, but I don't know what will work best for you.

I can't say how it impacts a traditional non-raid setup, though. YMMV in that scenario.

 

Maybe the HDD slows down with age. My access time has dropped from 18.4 to 18.9.

The older result was when it was new and tested in an eSATA enclosure.

John

 

John, did you tick the "advanced performance" option for your drive in the Device Manager?

 

I'm running XP. There is an option for write caching, which is enabled.

John

 

Defrag and optimize your hdd. Then your access time should be lower than when it's new.

 

Fragmentation will not affect the benchmark tests. I suspect the true cause of the slightly longer access times is that other processes are competing for use of the HDD. I can test this hypothesis when I get round to booting off my external HDD.

John

 

I think something is wrong with background process of these Hitachi's in this thread, mine WD 500GB is a bit higher like results:

 

Maybe it is partitioned ???

 

I've re-run HD Tune with my 5K500.B as the secondary HDD and the access time is back down to 18.3ms.

John

 

Just so happen to have a spare 5K500.B laying next to me in the office right now. Here is CrystalMark, Atto, and HDtune for it all under best case scenario running off by itself on my SATA ExpressCard.

 

Regarding the access time, what could be happening that would cause it to jump from the expected 18.5 ms to nearly 22 ms? I'm going to run HD Tune again after I post this and shut down a bunch of running processes to see if maybe it was just some routine thing that was happening.

I just want to make sure that the drive isn't damaged. If it is, I can have it replaced before it becomes an issue. I am unfamiliar with the symptoms of a damaged drive.

Thanks to you all for your replies. It has been very informative.

--

Here are the results. I turned off essentially everything I was able to. :/

 

I've no idea at all, personally. all your transfer speeds look good.

My access times have actually gone down over time. 18.3 in my last test.