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New Hard Drive not performing well

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olivuts at yahoo

Nov 16, 2010, 11:50 PM

Post #1 of 19 (1787 views)
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New Hard Drive not performing well

Hi,

I just added another hard drive to my Myth Backend box. I now have a 170Gb drive
for the operating system and I also have 3 drives, a 500Gb, a 1Tb and a 2TB
drive for storage.

The 2Tb drive is the new one. The 1 Tb and the 2Tb are both Western Digital
Caviar Green types. All of the storage drives are formatted as XFS.

All storage drives are set up in the Storage groups so Myth automatically
assigns recordings to a drive. It seems that all recordings are going to the new
2Tb drive right now, I guess this is because it is only 8% used while the other
2 drives are around 85% used. The problem is that anything that is on the new
drives reacts very slowly to skipping or jumping. I can push the skip button,
the picture pauses and it can take 5 seconds for anything to happen, after 5
seconds the picture pixilates for a second then the recording starts 30 seconds
on. So skipping works but takes 5 seconds to happen.

If I view a recording that is on either of the other 2 drives I do not have the
skipping delay or the pixelation.

I'd appreciate any ideas on what is going on or any suggestions on tools to test
the hard drive performance.

Cheers

Steve

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rich_lists at richms

Nov 17, 2010, 12:17 AM

Post #2 of 19 (1774 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

You bought WD green drives. Nuff said there really. They are the pits.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtvnz-bounces [at] lists [mailto:mythtvnz-
> bounces [at] lists] On Behalf Of Steve V
> Sent: Wednesday, 17 November 2010 8:51 p.m.
> To: mythtvnz [at] lists
> Subject: [mythtvnz] New Hard Drive not performing well
>
> Hi,
>
> I just added another hard drive to my Myth Backend box. I now have a
> 170Gb drive
> for the operating system and I also have 3 drives, a 500Gb, a 1Tb and a
> 2TB
> drive for storage.
>
> The 2Tb drive is the new one. The 1 Tb and the 2Tb are both Western
> Digital
> Caviar Green types. All of the storage drives are formatted as XFS.

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jfpn at clearfield

Nov 17, 2010, 12:28 AM

Post #3 of 19 (1771 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On Tue, 2010-11-16 at 23:50 -0800, Steve V wrote:
> The 2Tb drive is the new one. The 1 Tb and the 2Tb are both Western Digital
> Caviar Green types. All of the storage drives are formatted as XFS.

Given the new one is a 2Tb WD it's probably one of the WDxxEARS drive
with 4k sectors (instead of 512b sectors)

That could be causing the slowdown.

See: https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_4_KiB_sector_issues

If that's the case, the only way to fix it is to reformat the 2Tb drive.
I use fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdX to make sure it's aligned properly.
(apparently you can use fdisk -c -u /dev/sdX on newer fdisk versions)

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Phone (+64-9) 358 2081 Clearfield Software Ltd
Fax (+64-9) 358 2083 1st Floor 8-10 Whitaker Place
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mythtvnz at hotblack

Nov 17, 2010, 12:43 AM

Post #4 of 19 (1771 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On 17/11/2010, at 8:50 PM, Steve V wrote:

> I'd appreciate any ideas on what is going on or any suggestions on tools to test
> the hard drive performance.

Is this one of the drives that uses the new 4K blocks rather than 512 byte blocks? I think they call it advanced format. Do you have a jumper for disabling it? On the WD Caviar Black 500GB I've got here jumpering pins 7-8 disables Advanced Format, although it's not documented anywhere on the drive.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/

But take note, on that page it says you need to do this before formatting/partitioning, so if you want to try it you'll need to move all your recordings off it first.

- Wade

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jonathan.hoskin at gmail

Nov 17, 2010, 1:19 AM

Post #5 of 19 (1758 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

> You bought WD green drives. Nuff said there really. They are the pits.

I'm considering upgrading to a 2TB drive. Is there actually a "green"
option that does work with Linux, out of the box, and is not the pits?

Otherwise, which non-green 2TB is working well for people?

--
Jonathan

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hads at nice

Nov 17, 2010, 1:32 AM

Post #6 of 19 (1762 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 22:19 +1300, Jonathan Hoskin wrote:
> I'm considering upgrading to a 2TB drive. Is there actually a "green"
> option that does work with Linux, out of the box, and is not the
> pits?

I've installed half a dozen or so of the WD Green 2TB drives and they
work well. I'd happily recommend them for a storage drive.

hads
--
http://nicegear.co.nz
New Zealand's Open Source Hardware Supplier

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olivuts at yahoo

Nov 17, 2010, 1:32 AM

Post #7 of 19 (1767 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

----- Original Message ----
> From: Wade Maxfield <mythtvnz [at] hotblack>
> To: MythTV in NZ <mythtvnz [at] lists>
> Sent: Wed, 17 November, 2010 9:43:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [mythtvnz] New Hard Drive not performing well
>
> On 17/11/2010, at 8:50 PM, Steve V wrote:
>
> > I'd appreciate any ideas on what is going on or any suggestions on tools to
>test
>
> > the hard drive performance.
>
> Is this one of the drives that uses the new 4K blocks rather than 512 byte
>blocks? I think they call it advanced format. Do you have a jumper for
>disabling it? On the WD Caviar Black 500GB I've got here jumpering pins 7-8
>disables Advanced Format, although it's not documented anywhere on the drive.
>
> http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/
>
> But take note, on that page it says you need to do this before
>formatting/partitioning, so if you want to try it you'll need to move all your
>recordings off it first.
>
> - Wade
>
Thanks to all for the quick replies. I have to say the 1Tb WD Green drive has
been no problem for over a year. So I had no reason not to buy a WD drive again.

Looks like I will have to do a bit more research next time.

I will do some checking this weekend and if possible set up the jumpering and
then reformat the drive after moving the recordings. I'll report back the
results.

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rich_lists at richms

Nov 17, 2010, 2:00 AM

Post #8 of 19 (1767 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

They speed up and slow down depending on use, frequent 2-3 second delays
just after you start to access them,

Also in desktop use they seem to get really bad when they get full. My
windows 7 machine changed from a total sloth that was unusable to quite ok
with just a change from a green to a black drive, the green tests ok,
benchmarks look ok.

As far as using it to store media on, its tolerable. Not tried one on a myth
machine yet because mine is in pieces as I needed parts for another PC, but
there is a massive difference between one and 2 copy operations onto or off
the WD green - 45-60MB/s for one, 5-6MB/S each for 2 of them. I guess the
silent and efficient seeking has its toll for performance.

I tried my old 1TB as a OS drive for my replacement firewall machine, it was
slower to boot than an old 160 gig IDE drive I cloned onto the WD green.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtvnz-bounces [at] lists [mailto:mythtvnz-
> bounces [at] lists] On Behalf Of Jonathan Hoskin
> Sent: Wednesday, 17 November 2010 10:19 p.m.
> To: MythTV in NZ
> Subject: Re: [mythtvnz] New Hard Drive not performing well
>
> > You bought WD green drives. Nuff said there really. They are the
> pits.
>
> I'm considering upgrading to a 2TB drive. Is there actually a "green"
> option that does work with Linux, out of the box, and is not the pits?
>
> Otherwise, which non-green 2TB is working well for people?
>
> --
> Jonathan
>
> _______________________________________________
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> mythtvnz [at] lists
> http://lists.ourshack.com/mailman/listinfo/mythtvnz
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hads at nice

Nov 17, 2010, 2:15 AM

Post #9 of 19 (1768 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

Please fix your top posting.

On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 23:00 +1300, Richard (lists account) wrote:
> They speed up and slow down depending on use,

Actually, they don't, common misconception.

> frequent 2-3 second delays just after you start to access them,

I've not seen this on the half dozen or so that I've used.

> I tried my old 1TB as a OS drive for my replacement firewall machine,
> it was slower to boot than an old 160 gig IDE drive I cloned onto the
> WD green.

The trick is to use them for a storage drive, not an operating system
drive.

Speed, low power, quiet, you can't have all of those in one spinning
disk.

hads
--
http://nicegear.co.nz
New Zealand's Open Source Hardware Supplier

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rich_lists at richms

Nov 17, 2010, 3:16 AM

Post #10 of 19 (1756 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtvnz-bounces [at] lists [mailto:mythtvnz-
> bounces [at] lists] On Behalf Of Hadley Rich
> Sent: Wednesday, 17 November 2010 11:16 p.m.
> To: MythTV in NZ
> Subject: Re: [mythtvnz] New Hard Drive not performing well
>
> Please fix your top posting.
>
> On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 23:00 +1300, Richard (lists account) wrote:
> > They speed up and slow down depending on use,
>
> Actually, they don't, common misconception.

Performance is defiantly varying depending on the mood of the drive. Sound
of the drive changes between access and not access, strong evidence that
something is changing in them depending on if they are used or not.

> > frequent 2-3 second delays just after you start to access them,
>
> I've not seen this on the half dozen or so that I've used.

I change track, and the light comes on solid for a moment, and often the
first half second of the song plays, it pauses briefly and then continues
once its settled. If the next track is on the same drive, no problems, if
its the other drive, then same glitch again. Its like they are going to
sleep or something despite me choosing never in the OS.

> > I tried my old 1TB as a OS drive for my replacement firewall machine,
> > it was slower to boot than an old 160 gig IDE drive I cloned onto the
> > WD green.
>
> The trick is to use them for a storage drive, not an operating system
> drive.
>
> Speed, low power, quiet, you can't have all of those in one spinning
> disk.

I don't see the power savings to be there to put up with it. Sure, they are
a little cooler than a proper drive, but so what, fans don't cost much
anyway. I really struggle to see the point of them other than scoring
marketing points with the greenwash brigade. If they were not the cheapest I
would never have considered them as an option, sadly they were, I did, and I
am stuck with them now.

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nick.rout at gmail

Nov 17, 2010, 11:01 AM

Post #11 of 19 (1737 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Richard (lists account)
<rich_lists [at] richms> wrote:
> You bought WD green drives. Nuff said there really. They are the pits.

stop top posting.

And you are wrong, many many people on the mythtvusers mailing list
have reported the green drives as just great for mythtv.

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steve at greengecko

Nov 17, 2010, 11:45 AM

Post #12 of 19 (1739 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 22:32 +1300, Hadley Rich wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 22:19 +1300, Jonathan Hoskin wrote:
> > I'm considering upgrading to a 2TB drive. Is there actually a "green"
> > option that does work with Linux, out of the box, and is not the
> > pits?
>
> I've installed half a dozen or so of the WD Green 2TB drives and they
> work well. I'd happily recommend them for a storage drive.
>
> hads
+1 The fact that some linux distros are incapable of automatically
recognising and handling the 4k sectors should not be a reason for
slagging them off.

Although I was pretty p*ssed off first time I came across it...
http://www.greengecko.co.nz/content/western-digital-can-i-have-my-2-days-back

(:

Steve

--
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steven at openmedia

Nov 17, 2010, 11:53 AM

Post #13 of 19 (1738 views)
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Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On 18/11/2010, at 8:01 AM, Nick Rout wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Richard (lists account)
> <rich_lists [at] richms> wrote:
>> You bought WD green drives. Nuff said there really. They are the pits.
>
>
> stop top posting.
>
> And you are wrong, many many people on the mythtvusers mailing list
> have reported the green drives as just great for mythtv.
>

I've used plenty of the WD Green drives and I don't see any performance issues when using them as storage.

Be careful doing Raid with them, just look up TLER in google, but otherwise they are excellent value.

Mind due I don't enable sleep on my drives so I'm no getting your start up issues. Do you have the drive set to auto sleep after a short period?

Steve

Steven Ellis - Technical Director
OpenMedia Limited
email - steven [at] openmedia
website - http://www.openmedia.co.nz

kenneth.b.dixon at gmail

Nov 17, 2010, 12:42 PM

Post #14 of 19 (1717 views)
Permalink

Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On 18 November 2010 08:53, Steven Ellis <steven [at] openmedia> wrote:

>
> On 18/11/2010, at 8:01 AM, Nick Rout wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Richard (lists account)
> <rich_lists [at] richms> wrote:
>
> You bought WD green drives. Nuff said there really. They are the pits.
>
>
>
> stop top posting.
>
> And you are wrong, many many people on the mythtvusers mailing list
> have reported the green drives as just great for mythtv.
>
>
> I've used plenty of the WD Green drives and I don't see any performance
> issues when using them as storage.
>
> Be careful doing Raid with them, just look up TLER in google, but otherwise
> they are excellent value.
>
> Mind due I don't enable sleep on my drives so I'm no getting your start up
> issues. Do you have the drive set to auto sleep after a short period?
>
>
>
Agreed, I have a couple of WD green 1TB (one internal and one external) both
are used for storage and work fine for this purpose.
However at one stage I was using internal one as a system drive as well and
it was not up to the task.

Ken

duncan.kennington at gmail

Nov 17, 2010, 1:24 PM

Post #15 of 19 (1731 views)
Permalink

Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On 18 November 2010 09:42, Kenneth Dixon <kenneth.b.dixon [at] gmail> wrote:

>
> On 18 November 2010 08:53, Steven Ellis <steven [at] openmedia> wrote:
>
>>
>> I've used plenty of the WD Green drives and I don't see any performance
>> issues when using them as storage.
>>
>> Be careful doing Raid with them, just look up TLER in google, but
>> otherwise they are excellent value.
>>
>> Mind due I don't enable sleep on my drives so I'm no getting your start up
>> issues. Do you have the drive set to auto sleep after a short period?
>>
>>
> Agreed, I have a couple of WD green 1TB (one internal and one external)
> both are used for storage and work fine for this purpose.
> However at one stage I was using internal one as a system drive as well and
> it was not up to the task.
>
> I have two WD 1.5TB drives, both XFS formatted and they're fine. And to be
fair to Western Digital, there was a big sticker on the front of the
antistatic bag that they came in saying that it was formatted with 4k
sectors and some operating systems would need some configuration tweaks for
the performance not to be affected. Pointed me to their website about it.
No problems at all.

Duncan

ross at inertia

Nov 17, 2010, 2:14 PM

Post #16 of 19 (1730 views)
Permalink

Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

Hi all

For what it's worth, I had severe performance difficulties on some 1TB
WD Green drives purchased when they first appeared. They did not have
warnings of 4K sector size so it is possible that these were the old
size.

I was getting around 1MB/s write speeds which is pretty awful even for
a storage drive, especially with streaming data coming in!

After seeing that it was going to take over a week to sync a RAID1
array I thought that there must be some sort of issue here. Many hours
of investigation ensued but what eventually solved it for me was to
disable native command queuing (NCQ) on the particular ports of the SATA
card those drives were on. This can be accomplished in a script on
startup with

echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth

(replacing sda with wherever those drives are, obviously)

I now get ~8MB/s write speed which, while still on the slow side, is
now adequate for storage.

Ross

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steve at greengecko

Nov 17, 2010, 2:53 PM

Post #17 of 19 (1722 views)
Permalink

Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 11:14 +1300, Ross Williamson wrote:
> Hi all
>
> For what it's worth, I had severe performance difficulties on some 1TB
> WD Green drives purchased when they first appeared. They did not have
> warnings of 4K sector size so it is possible that these were the old
> size.
>
> I was getting around 1MB/s write speeds which is pretty awful even for
> a storage drive, especially with streaming data coming in!
>
> After seeing that it was going to take over a week to sync a RAID1
> array I thought that there must be some sort of issue here. Many hours
> of investigation ensued but what eventually solved it for me was to
> disable native command queuing (NCQ) on the particular ports of the SATA
> card those drives were on. This can be accomplished in a script on
> startup with
>
> echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth
>
> (replacing sda with wherever those drives are, obviously)
>
> I now get ~8MB/s write speed which, while still on the slow side, is
> now adequate for storage.
>

You've got some of the early EARS drives with the 4k sectors. They
didn't have the warning labels, but *DO* have 4k sectors if the part
number ends with those 4 characters.

It is possible to reformat a mirrored pair in situ with fairly low risk
- half the pair's down while rebuilding the other half. Just a case of
break, reformat, resilver for each half.

Once done, you're up to decent performance... target is a raid 1 pair of
1TB WD green EARS disks.

sync ; sync ; time ( cp ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso /home/mm ;
sync ;sync )

real 0m15.374s
user 0m0.020s
sys 0m2.300s

So 15 seconds for 710MB is a write speed in excess of 45MB/sec.

Interestingly, not as fast as the reverse ( where the target is a 4 disk
raid 5 partition on old non green 300GB WD disks ) which took 12
seconds.

Steve

--
Steve Holdoway <steve [at] greengecko>
http://www.greengecko.co.nz
MSN: steve [at] greengecko
Skype: sholdowa

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ross at inertia

Nov 17, 2010, 3:20 PM

Post #18 of 19 (1719 views)
Permalink

Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

> You've got some of the early EARS drives with the 4k sectors. They
> didn't have the warning labels, but *DO* have 4k sectors if the part
> number ends with those 4 characters.

They are
WDC WD10EACS-00C 1B01

Which would seem to suggest 512 byte, not 4k.

Ross

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ross at inertia

Nov 17, 2010, 4:07 PM

Post #19 of 19 (1724 views)
Permalink

Re: New Hard Drive not performing well [In reply to]

Hi Steve

I do appreciate your informative response, even if it didn't appear so
from my previous hastily-written response. As mentioned the drives are
EACS not EARS and dmesg seems to confirm 512 byte sectors:

[ 40.755982] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors
(1000205 MB)

As for the speed,

> sync ; sync ; time ( cp ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso /home/mm ;
> sync ;sync )

I couldn't get that exact file, so I got the closest which was
ubuntu-10.04.1-server-amd64.iso (682MB)

sync ; sync ; time ( cp ubuntu-10.04.1-server-amd64.iso /export/drbd3/
;sync ;sync )

real 1m18.001s
user 0m0.132s
sys 0m5.292s

Target is a RAID1 array with the aforementioned WD Green WD10EACS-00C
drives.

As mentioned, this is adequate for what it is being used for but
nowhere near the speeds you are reporting. Speeds with NCQ on are
roughly 1/8th of this. I just assumed the drives were cheap and nasty.

Ross

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