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WD Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB seems slow...

G

graysky

Senior member
I just bought a Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB (SATAII, 7200 RPM, 32 Mb cache). I ran a few disk benchmarks on it and found that is seems pretty darn slow compared to my Seagate drives. Does anyone else have this WD drive and would you mind running HD Tach on it if you run windows or hdparm if you run LINUX and report the results.

Here are the results using HD Tach under XP Pro 64-bit:
Random access: 14.3ms
Average read: 89.6 MB/s
Burst Speed 224.9 MB/s

Here are the results under LINUX using hdparm
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 13500 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6761.12 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 244 MB in 3.02 seconds = 80.92 MB/sec

As a comparison, I ran the same two benchmarks on my Seagate ST3750330AS (also 750 Gb, 7200 RPM, 32 Mb cache):

Here are the results using HD Tach under XP Pro 64-bit:
Random access: 12.9ms
Average read: 91.4 MB/s
Burst Speed 247.6 MB/s

Here are the results under LINUX using hdparm
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 15880 MB in 2.00 seconds = 7952.77 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 344 MB in 3.01 seconds = 114.19 MB/sec
 
Originally posted by: graysky
I ran a few disk benchmarks on it and found that is seems pretty darn slow compared to my Seagate drives.
Click to expand...
Can you tell any difference at all, without knowing what some numbers report?
Why did you buy one of the lower density "Black" drives? Was it purely price/GB?
The 640GB or 1TB would have benched you better numbers.

 
@Blain - it seems slower, yes. I don't think this is a low density black drive. My understanding is that it is a 3-platter setup just like my Seagate.
 
specifically, the 640 has 2x 320GB platters and the 1TB has 3 x 333GB platters.
So the 750GB is slower.
Soon we will have some single platter 500GB and 2x500GB 1 TB drives and so on.
 
Check platter density, etc before you buy next time.

BTW, Is it really worth the bother to send the WD back?
 
Yeah it'll be a pain in the balls to get a new drive run gparted to copy over all the partition and I'll have to wipe this drive prior to returning it (18 hours at least) but it's just too slow in comparison to the Seagate it replaced. Does anyone in here have the 1TB version of this drive and care to post HD Tach or hdparm results?

EDIT: yeah, too much of a pain. I just gparted my seagate 640 to contain the same partitions as this 750. I'll use the 750 as my backup drive so the speed really doesn't matter.
 
Originally posted by: Blain
The 750GB "Black" has 3 x 250GB platters.
The 640GB and 1TB "Black" have higher platter density.
Click to expand...

aren;t they coming up with even higher platter density? i heard all major manufactures are this year. I got a 3 platter 1tb love it.
 
What are you using the drives for?

Chances are you would not see any (real world) differences between the two and certainly not enough to warrant returning them! The firmware optimization in the 32MB black pcb actually translates to a slightly faster response time on the desktop than the Seagates. Again YMMV and is highly dependent on application.
 
Originally posted by: graysky
Yeah it'll be a pain in the balls to get a new drive run gparted to copy over all the partition and I'll have to wipe this drive prior to returning it (18 hours at least) but it's just too slow in comparison to the Seagate it replaced. Does anyone in here have the 1TB version of this drive and care to post HD Tach or hdparm results?

EDIT: yeah, too much of a pain. I just gparted my seagate 640 to contain the same partitions as this 750. I'll use the 750 as my backup drive so the speed really doesn't matter.
Click to expand...

just quick format it, its not like someone in the factory is gonna run data recovery on it.

Also, if there is any data to backup before sending it, that means it stores unique data? you should have proper backups you know.
 
i have the same drive on vista 64 bit and get the following results -
random access is 13.9 seconds
average read speed is 94.9 mb's
burst speed is 218.8 mb's
 
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