Slow drive

[comda]

Greetings!

About 2 years ago i made a purchase of an Acer AM3970-ES11p Tower. Now usually i build my own systems but i couldnt pass up an i7 for $250. Its an i7 2600K, 6GB of RAM, and a 1.5TB green drive on clearance. I later added a Used NVidia Geforce 9600GT 512mb.

Anyways, (great bargain eh) i just did a format reload my way, not acers crappy restore with extra software no one uses. I used a legit windows key formatted the system got the drivers for everything its great! Since my brother is using this system i havnt used it for a year. However im currently doing a virus scan on the 200GB he decided to keep because the machine was badly infected but It seems like that green drive is SLLLLLOOOOOOOOW. I copied 219Gb in 3 hours from it back to it. 3 Hours each. Right now im copying the same exact Data to my system that has a WD black and within a few minutes its copied 45Gb and it says 1 hour remaining.

The computer seems sluggish and since im not used to a green drive and i know their slower is there anything i can do to maybe unlock it so it doesnt spin down to 5400RPM? I was debating if i wanted to actually install windows on an Old 80Gb WD blue, and have that green drive as the secondary slave drive to make windows and general usage faster. Any thoughts?

[Geek-9pm]

Too much information.
You test a drive with the tools from the maker.
If it is measurably slow, you replace it.
FYI, speeding time with drive our know to be defective is as waster of effort.
That standard speed for desktop hard drives is 7200 RPM.
You can buy a new brand name HDD for about $60 for a 500 GB.
Hard Drive Price.

Old drives can be recycled as doorstops. 

[comda]

its not a dying drive. Its a Green drive. So it runs low power at 5400RPM and speeds up to 7200 when it needs to. But that causes lag. so i was wondering if i can set in the settings somewhere for it to always be at 7200

[DaveLembke]

Might be an option under Power Management or BIOS management to go max performance. I have never owned a variable speed drive like this before. Only green drives I have ever had were the ones that in power management you tell to go to put the drive to sleep after sat 15 minutes of inactivity etc. And then when you go to use the drive it then has to spin up and then access data. I only used this feature on laptops when running on battery power although i suppose it might make a desktop systems drive(s) last longer if they were not constantly spinning when idle etc.

[BC_Programmer]

So i was wondering if i can set in the settings somewhere for it to always be at 7200

I doubt it. the spin down and spin up feature are completely under the control of the drive firmware, I expect.

[Calum]

its not a dying drive. Its a Green drive. So it runs low power at 5400RPM and speeds up to 7200 when it needs to. But that causes lag. so i was wondering if i can set in the settings somewhere for it to always be at 7200

The Intellipower drives actually don't vary their RPM, they stay the same speed at all times.  It's just marketing from WD.  The Green drives are quite slow compared to faster" mechanical drives but not to that extent, I'd perhaps test the drive for bad sectors using HD Tune and maybe run a benchmark on it using the same program to check how slow it really is as this could be a sign of a fault with the drive.

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

Green Western digital drives are not normally that slow.
I would run http://www.benchbench.com/
Check for high IOPS readings as this could be a slow motherboard controller.
Are you coping sata to sata, if you coping  sata to USB it could be the USB that's slow not the green drive.