Short version:
My new WD6400AAKS drive performed absolutely terribly in my system (C2D E6850, P5K Premium, 4GB Patrior PC2-6400). I ended up RMA'ing the drive, but when the replacement came it was just as bad. Does anyone have any theories on this? What are the odds I ended up with two dud drives back to back?
Long version:
Not too long ago I decided to yank the 500 GB 7200.10 drive from my main computer and make it a part of a RAID-10 array in my file server. I replaced it with a faster, and more importantly, quieter WD6400AAKS drive. This was for a system with an Asus P5K Premium, C2D E6850 and 4 GB of PC2-6400 RAM.
Since I was using a new hard drive and needed to format anyway, I decided to give the Windows 7 Beta a try.
I have never seen a hard drive perform so poorly in my life.
When used as the system drive, it couldn't even sustain reads or writes at 10 MB/s; startup times were abysmal; during disk activity (loading apps, opening new browser tabs, installing software), the system would hang and become unresponsive; when attempting to download to the drive (specifically with Steam), the downloading app would often crash and occasionally even cause BSOD.
So, troubleshooting commenced. I noticed in Event Viewer that I was getting a tremendous number of atapi errors (Screenshot), and this was causing the drive to fall back to PIO mode. Tried replacing the cable, different SATA port on motherboard, switched from AHCI to IDE (apparently Windows 7 can do this, I thought IDE/AHCI had to be set before installing the OS?). No result from any of that.
I figured it might just be a Windows 7 issue, so I formatted again and tried installing Vista Business. If I thought it was slow before, the speed here enlightened me as to what the word "slow" really means. It took a couple hours to install Vista, and the result was almost totally unusable. I struggled with it long enough to verify that the atapi errors were still appearing in the Event Viewer, then gave up.
Next up I tossed an old Maxtor Diamondmax 10 in, and installed Windows on that. The WD drive was connected as a secondary. As as a secondary drive, read/write was a bit better, but still under 20 MB/s, still generated lots of atapi errors, still occasional BSOD errors, and still a noticable impact on system responsiveness during write operations. I ran a couple benchmarks against it. Sandra pegged the sequential write speed at a little over 10 MB/s. HDTach's sequential read test had an average of 85 MB/s, but the graph showed it dropping to 0 MB/s at 26 points (Screenshot). I downloaded WD's DLG Diagnostics tool and tried an Extended Test on the drive. Two days after it started, I figured it was probably never going to finish. I requested an advance replacement.
The replacement is now here, and I eagerly plugged it in to find... it works just as bad as the last one (a bit faster I think, but still abysmally slow and with lots of atapi errors).
I tossed one of the flaky drives into another older system (A64 3000+, MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI). On this system the drive was still very slow (30-35 MB/s speeds in real world file copy and file move tests). However, no errors in Event Viewer and nothing unusual in HDTach. WD DLG diagnostic completes in about 2 hours with no errors.
WD support has recommended that I RMA the drive again. I'm not so sure. What does everyone here think? Does it look like I just got two bad apples by luck of the draw, or perhaps my system just has some deep grudge against the WD6400AAKS drive that will remain no matter how many replacements I get. I just don't want to go around in circles paying the shipping costs for repeated replacements if I'm going to keep ending up back where I started - I'd rather cut my losses and get a Samsung F1 instead.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Details I may have missed?
My new WD6400AAKS drive performed absolutely terribly in my system (C2D E6850, P5K Premium, 4GB Patrior PC2-6400). I ended up RMA'ing the drive, but when the replacement came it was just as bad. Does anyone have any theories on this? What are the odds I ended up with two dud drives back to back?
Long version:
Not too long ago I decided to yank the 500 GB 7200.10 drive from my main computer and make it a part of a RAID-10 array in my file server. I replaced it with a faster, and more importantly, quieter WD6400AAKS drive. This was for a system with an Asus P5K Premium, C2D E6850 and 4 GB of PC2-6400 RAM.
Since I was using a new hard drive and needed to format anyway, I decided to give the Windows 7 Beta a try.
I have never seen a hard drive perform so poorly in my life.
When used as the system drive, it couldn't even sustain reads or writes at 10 MB/s; startup times were abysmal; during disk activity (loading apps, opening new browser tabs, installing software), the system would hang and become unresponsive; when attempting to download to the drive (specifically with Steam), the downloading app would often crash and occasionally even cause BSOD.
So, troubleshooting commenced. I noticed in Event Viewer that I was getting a tremendous number of atapi errors (Screenshot), and this was causing the drive to fall back to PIO mode. Tried replacing the cable, different SATA port on motherboard, switched from AHCI to IDE (apparently Windows 7 can do this, I thought IDE/AHCI had to be set before installing the OS?). No result from any of that.
I figured it might just be a Windows 7 issue, so I formatted again and tried installing Vista Business. If I thought it was slow before, the speed here enlightened me as to what the word "slow" really means. It took a couple hours to install Vista, and the result was almost totally unusable. I struggled with it long enough to verify that the atapi errors were still appearing in the Event Viewer, then gave up.
Next up I tossed an old Maxtor Diamondmax 10 in, and installed Windows on that. The WD drive was connected as a secondary. As as a secondary drive, read/write was a bit better, but still under 20 MB/s, still generated lots of atapi errors, still occasional BSOD errors, and still a noticable impact on system responsiveness during write operations. I ran a couple benchmarks against it. Sandra pegged the sequential write speed at a little over 10 MB/s. HDTach's sequential read test had an average of 85 MB/s, but the graph showed it dropping to 0 MB/s at 26 points (Screenshot). I downloaded WD's DLG Diagnostics tool and tried an Extended Test on the drive. Two days after it started, I figured it was probably never going to finish. I requested an advance replacement.
The replacement is now here, and I eagerly plugged it in to find... it works just as bad as the last one (a bit faster I think, but still abysmally slow and with lots of atapi errors).
I tossed one of the flaky drives into another older system (A64 3000+, MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI). On this system the drive was still very slow (30-35 MB/s speeds in real world file copy and file move tests). However, no errors in Event Viewer and nothing unusual in HDTach. WD DLG diagnostic completes in about 2 hours with no errors.
WD support has recommended that I RMA the drive again. I'm not so sure. What does everyone here think? Does it look like I just got two bad apples by luck of the draw, or perhaps my system just has some deep grudge against the WD6400AAKS drive that will remain no matter how many replacements I get. I just don't want to go around in circles paying the shipping costs for repeated replacements if I'm going to keep ending up back where I started - I'd rather cut my losses and get a Samsung F1 instead.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Details I may have missed?
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