Question : Slow Transfer Rates with a SATA Drive

Hello,

I recently bought a new computer which has a Western Digital Cavier Green 1TB SATA HDD (model is EARS100) and I am experiencing what I'd say are very bad transfer rates. I've tried copying numerous large files from the hard drive to different folders (on the same hard drive) and the transfer will start at around 80mb/s but then gradually drop down to 30mb/s and in some cases keep going further; one transfer actually went down to 19mb/s.

Can anyone recommend a way of potentially improving these transfer rates? I read that running the WD Align utility should help but it hasn't improved the performance at all.

Answer : Slow Transfer Rates with a SATA Drive

The Green series drives run at 5400rpm (not 5200) ... but Yes, a 7200 rpm drive will be substantially faster.     You don't buy WD Green drives for performance -- you buy them for low power consumption, cool operation, and an excellent cost/gigabyte.     The Caviar Black series has far better performance ... not only because of the higher RPM, but also because they have dual I/O processors which help them operate more efficiently in managing their cache and optimizing seek times.

The Green series drives are, however, very good drives and are excellent for high-capacity storage when you don't need high performance.    I'd never use one for my OS drive; or for a high-performance server; but for a high-capacity auxiliary storage server (such as my video server), they're perfect.