Ironwolf 8TB write speeds horrendous!

MajorMaccas · 7 Sep 2017 at 19:50

Bought a brand new Ironwolf 8TB hdd after being a total WD disciple because it was £40 less than WD Red 8TB.

Got it in my server, write speeds are awful, as in it may be faulty... I've got it set up as a simple volume, single GPT partition, no encryption, no storage spaces etc, and copying from another drive it starts out at ~130MB/s then after a few seconds, drops to 5 then stops for a bit then 5 etc.

Looking at resource mon, the entire time the drive is only writing at 10MB/s, though data is read from the source drive at the ~130MB/s rate until the RAM/cache/buffer etc is full then it's waiting for the ironwolf to write.

Is this just a fault drive (brand new), or is there something else that it could be? Perhaps a BIOS setting? I'm on a P9A-I/C2550/SAS/4L. All my other drives (upto 4TB) work fine out of the box. Any ideas?

MajorMaccas · 8 Sep 2017 at 11:36

Just an update to this... it was overheating. I have a Silverstone DS380, pretty much the smallest case you can fit 8 hot-swappable HDDs in. The airflow is pretty bad, specifically around the HDD enclosure. My other drives are 5900RPM and run cooler, the ironwolf is 7200RPM and between other drives, just ran too hot. I may return it for a WD Red 8TB as that is helium filled, since they have lighter platters and less powerful motors etc and 5900RPM should run nice and frosty!

Danny75 · 8 Sep 2017 at 12:51

Are you sure the normal WD Red 8TB is helium? Thought only the Ironwolf Pro and Red Pro range were helium.

rtho782 · 8 Sep 2017 at 15:06

I'd be very reluctant to use any case that allows drives to get so hot that they thermally throttle... I didn't realise that was even a thing.

I get worried about drives that get over about 44 degrees, heat is one of the biggest killers of HDDs.

KIA · 8 Sep 2017 at 18:44

How hot was the drive?

bledd · 11 Sep 2017 at 04:17

Yikes.

I don't like it when my drives reach 40 degrees at the peak of the summer. How hot were they getting?

MajorMaccas · 11 Sep 2017 at 11:33

I know this is very unreliable, going by touch, I'd say 60-70. I have now put a cardboard divider in the case so the fans have to blow through the drives, there's nowhere else for the air to go, and since I've had that in it's been fine, though I haven't felt how hot it is. I had no idea thermal throttling occurred on HDDs either, that was a new experience for me!

I don't know if I agree that heat is a HDD killer, since I've had a collection of WD Purples and Reds in my little server box for a few years now with some SSDs as cache drives, all running around 50+, the purples doing a daily backup of the reds, with parity, and none have died yet. They're about to surpass their warranties, which is all I really ask I may have been lucky, or it could just not be a big contributor.

Yes the normal WD Red is helium filled, but you are correct, only Ironwolf pro 8TB is helium.

bledd · 11 Sep 2017 at 12:13

Get them out of that oven and put them in a NAS. Dedicated fans for drives!

Over 50 is death territory for hard drives.

MajorMaccas · 11 Sep 2017 at 19:23

Well, if I start getting failures I will reconsider, for now though, the cardboard baffle seems to be helping matters pretty well, and I haven't had a disk go bad in that box yet. Got my 8TB helium Red today, am I the only one who gets excited about storage?