Hey all, I recently purchased two wd6401AALS, and had a little trouble getting one of them working. I was having errors at the end of attempting to format, and getting ATAPI error events 5 and 9, and Disk error events 11 and 51.
Benches on hdtune were stuck at ~3.9 mb/s
The second one worked perfectly when installed.
After getting the second one hooked up and running fine, I then tried the first again, and it now benched at a much higher rate, albeit still a little slower than the second drive, and had several very large drop offs to around 10 mb/s.
So, Part of me was thinking that the perhaps the cabling was possibly at fault, and it was stuck in pio mode, but that doesn't really explain the large drops in performance in the bench when it did work, or the performance difference now. (These are completely empty secondary drives).
When I bench it now, I don't get any more huge drops, but it is still a bit slower than the other drive.
Here are the benches and health in hdtune:
AALS Disk1 (slower, problem drive):
http://img245.imageshack.us/im...wdcwd6401aals00l3b.gif
http://img297.imageshack.us/im...thwd6401aals00l3b1.gif
This drive also has "24" as the value for "Ultra DMA CRC error count" under the "data" column.
Transfer Rate MB/sec
Min: 53.4
Max: 109.7
Average: 88.4
Access time: 12.0 ms
Burst Rate 146.6 MB/s
AALS Disk2 (faster drive):
http://img25.imageshack.us/img...wdcwd6401aals00l3b.gif
http://img22.imageshack.us/img...thwd6401aals00l3b2.gif
Transfer Rate MB/sec
Min: 57.6
Max: 118.4
Average: 92.8
Access time: 11.9 ms
Burst Rate 146.6 MB/s
Now, I don't know if this should concern me or not? I've had two and even three of the same drives before, and in my experience, they're usually pretty close. In looking at all the 640 aals benches out there, most of them report transfer rate numbers very close to the faster one.
Should I send it back? Keep it? Would you? The inconsistency is what bugs me. That, and the fact that this is probably one of the lowest, if not the lowest bench I've seen on this HD. The transfer rate listed on WD's site states 113 MB/s, and almost every single bench I've seen is between 116 and 120 MB/s.
Oh yeah, one more thing. This was from newegg, and the box was pretty beat up, and the bubble wrap was popped on the corners. So it was probably bouncing around pretty good. No bad sectors though.
(can't post images?)
Benches on hdtune were stuck at ~3.9 mb/s
The second one worked perfectly when installed.
After getting the second one hooked up and running fine, I then tried the first again, and it now benched at a much higher rate, albeit still a little slower than the second drive, and had several very large drop offs to around 10 mb/s.
So, Part of me was thinking that the perhaps the cabling was possibly at fault, and it was stuck in pio mode, but that doesn't really explain the large drops in performance in the bench when it did work, or the performance difference now. (These are completely empty secondary drives).
When I bench it now, I don't get any more huge drops, but it is still a bit slower than the other drive.
Here are the benches and health in hdtune:
AALS Disk1 (slower, problem drive):
http://img245.imageshack.us/im...wdcwd6401aals00l3b.gif
http://img297.imageshack.us/im...thwd6401aals00l3b1.gif
This drive also has "24" as the value for "Ultra DMA CRC error count" under the "data" column.
Transfer Rate MB/sec
Min: 53.4
Max: 109.7
Average: 88.4
Access time: 12.0 ms
Burst Rate 146.6 MB/s
AALS Disk2 (faster drive):
http://img25.imageshack.us/img...wdcwd6401aals00l3b.gif
http://img22.imageshack.us/img...thwd6401aals00l3b2.gif
Transfer Rate MB/sec
Min: 57.6
Max: 118.4
Average: 92.8
Access time: 11.9 ms
Burst Rate 146.6 MB/s
Now, I don't know if this should concern me or not? I've had two and even three of the same drives before, and in my experience, they're usually pretty close. In looking at all the 640 aals benches out there, most of them report transfer rate numbers very close to the faster one.
Should I send it back? Keep it? Would you? The inconsistency is what bugs me. That, and the fact that this is probably one of the lowest, if not the lowest bench I've seen on this HD. The transfer rate listed on WD's site states 113 MB/s, and almost every single bench I've seen is between 116 and 120 MB/s.
Oh yeah, one more thing. This was from newegg, and the box was pretty beat up, and the bubble wrap was popped on the corners. So it was probably bouncing around pretty good. No bad sectors though.
(can't post images?)
Facebook
Twitter