WD15EADS-00P8B0 Really slow? Or am I just crazy?

[BeAuMaN]

Hello.

Bought a Western Digital 1.5TB Caviar Green a on the 30th of November from Amazon, shipped to my doorstep, mounted, installed...... then began the process of doing full partition and formats on the whole drive.

Running Vista x64, which has generally worked well enough on my system (Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, 8GB DDR2 RAM). The whole partition process took about a week, running in the background as I used my computer, using the "Disk Management" tool, under "Storage" in the "Computer Management" program. Four primary partitions were created, doing a full format (as opposed to a quick format), the first three at  300 GB, and the rest of the space allocated to the fourth partiotn. The fourth partition was formatted using diskpart in command prompt, as the Disk Management tool didn't want to make the fourth partition a primary partition.

Anyhow, during this time, I didn't do any read or writes on the drive while it partitioned and formatted. Once it was finished, I then began to copy over some anime. It said it'd take some ungodly amount of time to copy over 24GB (somewhere above 20 hours, iirc)... So I cancelled.

I then copied over a few files, and found them hardly accessible. After some fanangling, I set up a test.

I first copied over an episode of Spice & Wolf, mkv container, h.264 encoded, weighing in at about ~230MB. Copied over in about 8 seconds. Then, I went to -play- the file by double clicking it. The default program set for this is Media Player Classic. Once I double clicked it, I used a stopwatch...

Two minutes, and twenty three seconds passed by, and it finally started playing. Of course, at the beginning, it was hardly buffered, and had a few stops... and even as it continued to play, it had a 30-50ms jitter, meaning that the read/write of the video was off, as it should be around 3-6ms in my usual experience on this computer.

I would note that something like 5-15 minutes later, when I accessed it, it played normally.

I ran an error check using DOS WD Lifeguard tools, the quick scan option, and no errors were found.

This leads me to question if the drive is at fault... I'm pretty decent when it comes to computers and troubleshooting, but this would be my first drive I've ventured with past 320GB.

Now, I can -still- return this drive to Amazon... but I want to hear other thoughts or suggestions first. Is this the sort of thing that this drive has been known for?

[arpuress]

Could you check the Vista system log and see if there were any disk related errors? Also it'd be good to check what DMA speeds your drives are set at (if in ATA/IDE mode)...with enough errors Windows will keep reducing the speed grade until the hard drive is working in some PIO compatibilty mode. Real slow then.

I had something similar happen last year and it appeared to be a cable problem. The weird thing is all I had to do with take the cable out and reconnect it (or connected it to a different SATA port) and the recurring errors were gone. I'm still not convinced that was it but there are limits to my patience when troubleshooting hardware/software problems.

[BeAuMaN]

@ arpuress:

Well, there seems to be nothing in Event Viewer or Problems History. All ATA/IDE Controllers (Though this drive is SATA) are set to DMA, and all SATA controllers are set to DMA as well. As for the Cable problem... funny enough... originally I had run the WD Lifeguard Tools Diagnostics in the Windows environment, and I got a cable error. This caused me to swap out three different cables (Had extras from ASUS, I'd like to think that they felt bad for people spending $300+ on a motherboard and gave us a whole buncha crap), all resulting with the same error. However, my main drive, which functions well enough, got this error too. Once I used the Lifeguard Tools in DOS though, it worked perfectly fine.. So I don't think it's the cable.

Interestingly enough, though... I hadn't noticed the benchmark tool in vista built into the controller properties dialog.

Essentially, go to Device Manager, IDE/ATA ATAPI controller, then to one of your motherboard's Serial ATA Controllers, Right-Click, Properties... Then go to one of the Port # tabs (Port 0, Port 1, etc). Right next to the Command Queuing checkbox option is the "Speed Test..." button. Click and test.

Here's some test results, all using SATA II.... measured in Millions of bytes per second:

Drive Name\Burst Speed\Sustained Speed

WD2500KS-00MJB0\118.1\61.0

ST3320620AS\124.5\56.0

WD15EADS-00P8B0\133.9\0.8

The Sustained Speed number for the Caviar Green 1.5TB (WD15EADS-00P8B0) is quite shocking... not even a full megabyte. I did some more retests, and the first two generally maintain the same numbers, within a margin of one or two whole numbers... while the WD Caviar Green (the last one) generally hovers somewhere between 0.1 and 4.2... and it spiked once to 10.1.

Again, I've never used these benchmarks before... but if these ARE accurate, then there's definitely something wrong.

Taking anymore suggestions... I've linked this thread in my support request, thank you once again arpuress!

[WOLF_OF_DK]

yes there seem to be a problem with WD15EADS-00P8B0 but WD dont seem to be willing to replace them so all we can hope for is a FW update until then you will have to live with a very slow HDD or hope the store will take it back

[unlstorm]

Hmmm, this sounds very similiar to my issue.  What was your resolution?  RMA the drive?

[Scr00ge]

I'm getting pretty much the same from a brand new WD20EADS, which seems to be the 2TB version.

I bought this one because I'd read so many bad reviews on the Seagate and Hitachi drives, with people having to RMA them, but it seems Western Digital are just as bad if not worse. 

I would prefer a drive to simply fail early in its life than have a uselessly slow drive with the hope there might be a firmware fix from the manufacturer.

Help !!

[unlstorm]

I have put in a help ticket on this subject.  Hopefully I get a response tomorrow.  I did some decent analysis and cross compares to see that this performance is WAY out of whack.  I am beginning to think it might have something to do with the drives "Intelliseek" feature.  I heard some things about a program called wdidle3 that I might investigate if I don't get a good answer back from support.  If all else fails I'm returning the drive.  It took me about 20 Hours to transfer 136 GB (38,000 files) of data from my Raptor Drive to this WD15EADS.  1MB/sec is about the speed I was getting.  This is unacceptable in my opinion.  Good to know I'm not the only one seeing the issue.  I'm not sure if the issue is only on writes or if it is also on reads?  I have been looking at data inside the Windows 7 drive speed tests.

-Tony

[at2ecw]

I am an A+ certified tech who happened to buy this particular drive for home use. I also have had the same problems with the drive being slow. I of course overlooked the most obvious thing.......If you get into device manager and click on that hard drive. In Windows Vista Choose the tab: Policies. When you see the 2 options click on  Optimize for performance. Click OK and it will prompt you to restart the computer. Now i have this in a usb enclosure and this made my speed go through the roof..hence normal operation. I don't have XP on my PC right now but it should be pretty similar in the steps. I hope this helps! Good Luck!

[AndyM]

It looks like I got the same problem too.

I bought couple of WD 1.5 TB external drive (Elements) (WD20EADS-00S2B0) and it was fine when I was backing up my stuff to it through DVD - then out of the blue the whole drive just died. I took it out of the drive enclosure, plug it in using E-SATA and thanked god that it still works, only to discover incredibly slow speed at reading/copying/transfering anything. It would take a GOOD 10 MINUTES to transfer 1.3 GB file. On my other drives (WD non-Green Power Crap)  it only took 40 seconds!!!

SO [text deleted]  IS WRONG WITH THIS?I REALLY WANT TO KNOW. NOW NOT ONLY IS MY EXTERNAL HDD NOT WORKING, TAKING IT OUT IT IS STILL A DUD. IT REALLY, REALLY MAKES ME ANGRY WD IS SO IRRESPONSIBLE AT HANDLING THIS. 

[AndyM]

AT2ECW,  I tried what u describe, it still does the same thing. I think the WD hardware is just faulty.