Question on external drives

[Airsculpture]

I bought a new WD USB drive to replace a failed external drive that houses all my media.

With the new drive (non mains powered) the loading of album artwork and the launching of movies is haphazard and slow and sometimes they don't load at all.

With the back up drive which is the same as the old failed drive, if I use that as the media storage the loading of album art is almost instantaneous and movies load and play almost immediately. It's a reasonably large library of 28,000 music tracks and about 1000 movies. This drive is a lot older but is powered by a mains adapter. Is this the reason for the difference in performance ?

Both are WD, both spin the same speed, both plugged into the same USB 3 port on the iMac but very different results in performance with the Apple TVs all over the house.

I'd love to use the newer drive as the principle drive but I've gone back to using the old back up drive instead because of performance.

Any thoughts ?

 

[Juicy Box]

Are they the same model drive?

both spin the same speed

The rotational speed is just one of many specs of a HDD that could affect the performance of the drive.

You could in fact have a HDD with a slower RPM out perform a HDD with a faster RPM.

With everything else being equal, a larger capacity drive could perform better than a smaller capacity drive for example.


All that said, if the new drive is a modern drive I wouldn't expect it to be slow on something like album art. Maybe there is an issue with the new drive.

Have you done a BMDST to the new drive? While the results wouldn't definitely prove that the new drive has issues, it could rule out some things.

 

[Juicy Box]

Also, look in the system profiler and see if the new drive is actually linking at 5Gbps.

 

[Airsculpture]

BMDST ?

 

[Airsculpture]

Here are the screenshots of the two drives plugged in:

The WD Elements is the old powered drive and the "Game" drive is the newer WD-Black non powered drive.

 

[waw74]

BMDST = black magic disk speedtest

‎Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

‎Disk Speed Test is an easy to use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to...

apps.apple.com

 

[Airsculpture]

Thanks. Everything seems even between the two. I’ve plugged the new drive back in and for now seems to be behaving.

Very strange