Copying Files between Internal Drives pauses for long periods

[holygamer]

I have a Seagate Archive 8TB drive. Over 1 year I've filled it with videos. Recently when copying files from it to a new drive via Tera Copy I noticed it couldn't copy a few files as it said they were corrupted. So I ran ChkDsk at boot and after 17 hours it did it's fixes but the few files were deleted as they were indeed corrupted.

I'm now trying to copy some files from another drive that were originally on the drive I'm copying to! It will copy a few files at normal SATA III speeds then it will just pause for a minute or so (it's not frozen, it's just that nothing is happening). I then tried another method. I used an FTP program to download the files to the drive and the same thing happens in the FTP program!

There's nothing wrong with the files I'm copying as I tried copying to my SSD C drive and they copy fine without pausing. So it seems my 8TB Seagate Archive drive is the problem?

I've never defragged it since I've had it. I'm defragging it now and it says it's 47% fragmented. So do you think once I've defragged it that this problem will be fixed? Or is it some other issue that's causing the problem?

Would quick formatting the drive remove the fragmentation? If so, I'll copy my files to another drive then format and copy back.

[peterb]

Formatting the drive would remove th effects of fragmentation. It clears the existing MFTs and writes new blank ones, so when you write to the disk, it just overwrites what was there before.

Video files are large files, but with that level,of fragmentation it may impact on the performance. Defragging will also take a long time if the disk has little spare capacity.

Another cause could be a faulty cable connecting the drive.

[DanceswithUnix]

I think that is a shingled drive, in which case some slowing down if it has to rewrite shingle zones is to be expected. Defragging will hopefully move everything around on the drive and leave some nice big clean areas to write into. I'm guessing, having never owned a shingled drive, but it would make sense. A proper defrag might take a long time though, so yes if you can lose the data on there then a quick format might help.

I would check SMART stats though, but then I always do that at the first sign of disc oddness.

[holygamer]

Thanks everyone for your help. Drive is showing as healthy in Crystal Disk Info. I bought the drive because it was the cheapest 8TB drive I could fine. I bought several of them. I actually needed all that space. I couldn't afford other drives as they were more expensive.

So I'm now using an SSD as my "working" drive for editing videos on. But I was wondering, would it be OK to edit the videos on the SSD but save the videos to the Seagate Archive drive. Isn't that the same as copying a file to the drive which is the drives purpose?

[peterb]

I think that is a shingled drive, in which case some slowing down if it has to rewrite shingle zones is to be expected. Defragging will hopefully move everything around on the drive and leave some nice big clean areas to write into. I'm guessing, having never owned a shingled drive, but it would make sense. A proper defrag might take a long time though, so yes if you can lose the data on there then a quick format might help.

I would check SMART stats though, but then I always do that at the first sign of disc oddness.

Thank you for that, it is technology I had missed, but found this

http://www.extremetech.com/computing...b-for-just-260

Which would account for the reduced performance, especially defragging drives which involves a lot of write operations.

So in answer to holy gamers last question, yes, use these drives for archive as that is what they are best at. Write performance will be slower, but read performance should be OK when you want to access the archive.

[holygamer]

What SMART stats should I be looking at to see if my drive is faulty?

[kalniel]

What SMART stats should I be looking at to see if my drive is faulty?

The ones in red here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Note your drive may not report exactly the full list - each make is different.

[holygamer]

Guys I copied everything from my 8TB Seagate Archive shingled drive onto another of the same drives. I formatted the drive before doing that so it's 0% fragmented. I also did a Defrag and Fast Optimize on the drive I'm copying from with SmartDefrag. Yet the drive still has difficulty in copying small files such as MPEG2 videos that are 1.5GB. I'm copying a folder of videos and it's paused for several minutes on 1 of the videos. By that I mean that nothing is happening.

Is that normal with small files like that?

[peterb]

If the drive you are copying to is a shingled drive, you are going to have write performance issues. As the article I linked to earlier explained, these drives use a specific recording technology to increas the storage density pet platter, but the write performance is not good, hence their use as archive media.

[holygamer]

I can accept slow copying but these files just stopped copying with nothing happening for half an hour. I tried to cancel the copy but it wouldn't let me do it. I had to restart my PC in the end.

[peterb]

Well, 'something' is happening if you couldn't cancel the copy. Whatever it is must be hogging the CPU if it isn't responding to the cancel input.

You could have a faulty SATA cable, the file could be corrupt on the Fisk you are copying from, or if the source disk is still fragmented, it could be taking time to follow the cluster trail to re-assemble the file, although I can't think that they would cause such long hand ups. If it is one file that is causing he problem, can you copy that to any other drive?

[Splash]

I'd imagine that you're filling the disk cache way quicker than it can write the data to disk, as you're transferring large amounts of data the disk cache will fill, then the OS will cache what it can, then it'll look like it's stopped. Until it's flushed all of that cache to disk it can't do anything (including cancel the operation, as that will only be able to stop putting data into OS cache). If you *only* copy one of the 1.5Gb files with no concurrent write operations do you see the same issue (might be helpful to try one of the same files that you're currently having an issue with).


Also consider your antivirus - if it's configured to scan on access then it'll be scanning these files for bad stuff at the same time which will only slow things further.

[peterb]

^sounds a more credible explanation than mine - thank you Splash

[kalniel]

I also find it quite handy to have the resource monitor running when doing large disk operations just so I can see what the queue size is on a given disk and whether any pauses are caused by CPU, caching or whatever.

When doing SSD transfer stuff it can occasionally flake out as it doesn't seem to keep up, but never had a problem with mechanical drive transfers.