Strange hard disk performance issue

[Halcyon]

Repeated this again (without moving, or touching any cables or drives)...

Erase under MHDD = Slow
Rebooted into Windows 7, ran format = Fast
Rebooted into MHDD = Fast

 

[edpalmer42]

When you move drives around are you hot-plugging them or do you power everything down first?  Maybe the custom firmware in these drives doesn't like hot-plugging.  This could even apply to a USB3 connection.

Ed

[Monkeh]

Repeated this again (without moving, or touching any cables or drives)...

Erase under MHDD = Slow
Rebooted into Windows 7, ran format = Fast
Rebooted into MHDD = Fast

 

Are you erasing the entire device or partitions?

[MrMobodies]

It's punishing you for all that Janet Jackson music.

 

Cheeky bitch.

Joke: Janet Jackson is hurting their heads so they can't think properly and therefore slow down. I wonder what the heads will have to say about that, calling them cheeky for their high tolerance and choosing wisely not to make mistakes at the expense of speed.

Repeated this again (without moving, or touching any cables or drives)...

Erase under MHDD = Slow
Rebooted into Windows 7, ran format = Fast
Rebooted into MHDD = Fast

 

Have you noticed or tried taking note to see if the drive parameters have changed when it works fast and when it goes slow like the ones here:


I remembered about 7 years ago there was some DMicros video recorders that had an IDE interface and couldn't get many IDE drives new anymore. We tried different sata converters where it didn't pick them the drive up or it just hung on detecting the drive. I brought in a few and this Silicon Image controller (I found them very reliable) worked where it did detect the drive and loaded up but as soon as formatting them it would never finish.

Some brand new IDE Hitachi drives were found and still being made but the recorders wern't detecting them. I tested the drives and they were fine. I compared a used Western Digital 500GB that worked and the new Hitachi drives that weren't being detected and noticed a difference in "ATA version". I  am not sure myself if that had something to do with it.

[Halcyon]

When you move drives around are you hot-plugging them or do you power everything down first?  Maybe the custom firmware in these drives doesn't like hot-plugging.  This could even apply to a USB3 connection.

Always powering down. The USB3 dock I use is a Tableau forensic dock with it's own power switch to power off drives before removing them.

Are you erasing the entire device or partitions?

Entire device using MHDD/DBAN/DiskKill, and partition when we're talking about Windows format.

Are you sure that the MHDD erase is writing with 4K alignment?

Are you letting it use BIOS functions?  If so, maybe there's a BIOS issue.

Maybe you should try writing with badblocks instead.

I've tried with the BIOS functions disabled previously and it didn't seem to make a difference. As I mentioned before, this behaviour has been observed across 3 different computers. I'm 99% certain it has something to do with the drives. I just don't know what. There doesn't seem to be an obvious reason but whatever it is I believe is deliberate (unless a whole batch of drives suddenly became faulty somehow).

Have you noticed or tried taking note to see if the drive parameters have changed when it works fast and when it goes slow like the ones here:

That was going to be my next task, was to try and view the drive parameters and compare.