Hard to live without a HDD

lostsoul62 · 24 Jan 2012

So I put in my SSD drive and it's fast and I have 2 external hard drives. So I'm on the phone and need some info from my data that is stored on my external WD 2TB which is a USB 3 hard drive and I have to wait 15 seconds for that thing to wind up in order for me to see my data and in the meantime I'm stalling for time. Once I see my data I can retrieve it in less than 5 second. So now I have to go back and install a HDD for my data so I will only have to wait 1 second instead of 15 and I’ll just put my WD 2 TB drive as a backup and backup my date when I have 15 seconds to spare. Why does it take my external drive so long for me to have access to it. Has anyone else experience this?

JimLewandowski · 24 Jan 2012

I believe (from doing some USB traces) that upon mounting an external drive, the System Volume Information folder is read/accessed. There's also all the power PnP stuff, etc., too.

carwiz · 24 Jan 2012

Check the power management options set for the USB Hub(s) in Device Manager. Windows could be turning off the Hub to save power if the box is checked.

linnemeyerhere · 25 Jan 2012

You can't expect the WD green drives they put in these usb externals to run with real HDD's. Get a 7200 rpm with at least 32 mb of cache or better is 64 mb and 10,000 rpm but now your're talking large sums.

essenbe · 25 Jan 2012

Or, it could be you are like me. I got used to the SSD and hard drives seem to take forever.

GeneO · 25 Jan 2012

linnemeyerhere said:

You can't expect the WD green drives they put in these usb externals to run with real HDD's. Get a 7200 rpm with at least 32 mb of cache or better is 64 mb and 10,000 rpm but now your're talking large sums.

Hate to disagree, but my WD 2TB EARS Green has faster read access than my 1TB WDC Black drive. 125 MB/s vs 110 MB/s and it only takes 10s to spin up (eSATA). It is dependent not only on the rpm, but the density of the drive. more bits crammed into the same space read at the same rpm will necessarily have a faster MB/s.

DeaconFrost · 25 Jan 2012

Maybe I'm confused as to what the problem might be, but what you see is actually typical and normal. If you want the data ready quickly at anytime, use an internal drive for storage, and an external for backup.

JimLewandowski · 25 Jan 2012

linnemeyerhere said:

You can't expect the WD green drives they put in these usb externals to run with real HDD's. Get a 7200 rpm with at least 32 mb of cache or better is 64 mb and 10,000 rpm but now your're talking large sums.

IIRC, the amount of time for me to take a Win7 System Image of my C drive (15Gig of used space) is the same for an internal 7200 RPM HDD as it is for an external USB HDD (5400? or 7200? - it's an Iomega HDD). I believe the USB2 interface is limiting enough that a 7200 RPM drive will be no faster.

lostsoul62 · 25 Jan 2012

carwiz said:

Check the power management options set for the USB Hub(s) in Device Manager. Windows could be turning off the Hub to save power if the box is checked.

I think this could be the problem so I went into device manager and I had 9 USB root hubs and I uncheck the box on all of them and it looks like my drives are normal. Thanks

carwiz · 25 Jan 2012

Great! Thanks for the follow-up. If all goes well, mark the thread Solved. It may help someone else having the same problem in the future.