i have the following in my server (non raided)
2x WD10EADS
1x WD10EAVS
1x WD15EADS
verified with WD life tools and hdtach.
only the WD15EADS is giving me trouble. for some reason the X drive doesn’t show up in performance test, though this test makes all the drives look very slow, but they actually perform just fine
Same problem here, WD15EADS-00P8B0 and really REALLY slow performance…
I hope WD will find something for us… I have 3 of those drives…
These are the results of a test I ran:
time in seconds of 10000 random writes of 4096 bytes blocks
same line = same random pattern
first run was from top to bottom
second run was from bottom to top
No other IO was being done on the disc.
1st run 2nd run
22.22 41.30
23.20 36.61
34.30 40.31
72.49 64.36
75.19 66.45
58.90 65.07
36.94 37.67
35.62 22.53
38.11 21.41
49.44 21.43
59.63 20.75
As you see the drive performance are ok for the first minute or so, than it starts to lock and they become awful. However it does not slow gracefully, it goes fast or it stops completely for a while.
I have settled for an RMA, but the tech support guy explicitely told me they did not acknowledge this kind of problem on this drive. He actually kept telling me the drive was fine and that I might have three different incompatible sata controllers and other bull**bleep**.
Then it turns out I have to send the drive in France to have it replaced.
Last time I buy WD.
i’m RMA-ing my drive, hopefully WD will acknowledge a speed issue with the drives.
I have the same problem. I bought 2 WD15EADS and connected them in linux software raid. They were working fine the first month, and then they started freezing from time to time. The freezing lasted for a few minutes and then they unfreeze at the same time. When they are frozen, the disk usage reported is 100% while actually no read/write is happening. I tried Ubuntu 9.10, openSuse 11.1, openSuse 11.2 and windowsXP and the problem arises even when I’m installing the OS-es. I have tried this on 2 different computers and the results are the same, connected trough sata or USB. Interestingly, on another coputer with win7 i could’n replicate the problem even after 4 hours of intensive testing. The WD align utility doesn’t work with the EADS series (I have tried an hour ago). Has anybody tried to realign the partitions using Gparted or similar tools? Does it help? I am going crazy 
This is WD problem with controller on drive 00P8B0 with firmware A01. After 5-10min work hdd BRAKES to 1-2 mb/sec -1-3min. Actual in other country in world to. Service WD know this problem and replace the hard drive. But WD officially has not confirmed this!!! =))
sorry for my english =) I hope u have understood
well, i RMA-ed the drive and i got my advanced replacement yesterday. the new replacement sadly is a recertified drive, same exact model number and firmware. i haven’t checked the warranty on it yet. i hope it retains my original warranty period and not some lame 1 year or 90 days warranty
its back up to speed. i’m getting write speeds around 65 - 75 MBps
it would be nice if this was a one-off, but i think i will have to RMA this new drive in a few months for the same thing
I purchased 5 of these drives a few months ago. Initially speeds seemed fine but recently I also experienced excessive slowdowns in write times. All have serial numbers starting with WMAV. None showed any SMART errors so I tested them one at a time by connecting them to another machine and running a script to copy a 6 GB file from a local drive over to them 10 times in succession, renaming the file each time. I did this with the drives formatted as basic, then again with them formatted as dynamic. Here are the results:
Copy Times: 
I RMAed the last drive and received what appears to be a new drive as a replacment, with a manufacture date of 1/2010. Also the serial number starts with WCAV. Here is the same test ran against that drive:
new drive:
The firmware version on this drive is the same as the others. Does anyone know what the different serial number prefix means? Different manufacturing location perhaps? What I don't know is if all the drives initially would have tested this same way and whether over time this one will also have issue. But in any case, I've also opened a RMA request for the 1st drive in the graph as well.
Well… I wish I would have found this thread before buying 4 MyBooks (hey, they were cheap at Best Buy) and spending 3+ days (i’m stubborn) trying to figure out what in the world is wrong with them.
2 are still sealed boxes, the other two are opened and used, one I dismantled (nicely, could pass as new) and sure enough it’s a WD15EADS-00P8B0. Identical problem all others have…works fine sometimes, then writes crawl to near non-existent speeds, then somehow recover and work fine again until the next time. This happens on different computers, hooked up SATA, e-SATA, USB. I didn’t try firewire, anybody got a card I can borrow? Sigh.
I bought these drives to extract nearly 5TB of iso’s I have, but at this pace they won’t be done until some time in April!
Well, back to Best Buy tomorrow I guess. I’ll wait until something else is on sale like 2TB’s. I have 1 and 2TB WD greens and have had no problems with them (except two DOA 2TB’s) but these 1.5’s are simply garbage.
Regards,
EluZioN
Update: Of the 4 drives one of them was a WCAV serial prefix, the other three were WMAV. None of the WMAV’s worked, however the WCAV (made in Thailand, not Malaysia) works flawlessly. I am exchanging one WMAV for the last WCAV in my area tonight, I suspect it will work fine as well. I sent mail to WD support to RMA for WCAV’s (if they will), other wise Best Buy will get them back.
Regards,
EluZioN
That’s good to know EluZioN, (about the serial #s) thanks!
It took a week for them to get my 2nd advance RMA in the mail, but based on the email notification it appears they are sending me another WCAV drive, this time model # WD15EADS-00R6B0.
Hopefully the WCAVs resolve the issues
The WCAV worked well for the first 8 hours, then fell into the same category (actually worse) and has now taken 24 hours to write 400GB over USB, while the first 300GB or so took less than 6 hours. With one folder of 2.5GB taking a stunning 3 hours to copy.
Western Digital support has not answered my case (4 days now). I give *waves white flag*, they are being returned to Best Buy tomorrow.
Regards,
EluZioN
Same Problem here - 100% drive light activity with no net increase in either drive reads or writes as reported by the windows 7 Disk Resource Monitor. The machine was built in September 09 and the problem has become noticeable in the last week or so. At least there’s no data corruption so it’ll clone to a SEAGATE just fine, get RMA’d and hopefully live out a peaceful live as a backup drive - that is , unless WD acknowledge this model/firmware develop faults and make a firmware patch… does anyone else think I’m dreaming but hope I’m not?
i tried to zero out the drive, so it wouldn’t have any data on it before i sent it in for my RMA. it was going to take several days to do…so i didn’t bother. nothing valuable on there anyways
I have to sent back my drive for an RMA, i got my RMA advanced replacement last week. the replacement has worked fine. we’ll see how long it lasts.
i think if i have to RMA this drive again, i will just sell the new drive. then i’ll replace it with an EARS drive. even though i don’t like the whole drive alignment procedure, setting a jumper initially shouldn’t be too much of a headache :smileyvery-happy:
mmm thought about the WD15EARS models… might just be easier to change back to seagate for a drive generation or two. WD clearly have “**bleep** to sort out…” with their current design/firmware.
I’m actually having the same issue that many have had in this thread and elsewhere around the Internet.
I have 2 WD15EADS 1.5TB drives. They are set up as one striped volume in a Windows XP Pro system which serves as my dedicated media server. I installed them about 5 months ago, and for awhile, I had no issues. Last week, I noticed that my HD recordings were totally unwatchable. Every few seconds would skip and be garbled with all kinds of weird digital noise. Non-HD recordings still worked fine. For the sake of troubleshooting, I moved my media center software over to my main CPU. HD recordings worked fine there, so I knew it wasn’t the tuners or the software.
Eventually, I thought to check the WD drives. I discovered that they had become pretty fragmented. I tried to run a defrag, but after about 10 hours, it wasn’t even to 5% complete. I ran a HDD benchmark test, and the average was below 3MB/sec. I was shocked. This appears to be the culprit. My HD video files are around 8GB/hour, which means I need at least a guaranteed sustained writing rate of 2-3MB/sec. On top of that, I’m often recording 2-3 HD shows at once.
After some research, I discovered this bit about Advanced Format drives. Supposedly, these EADS drives don’t have performance issues with XP. However, my drives DO have the jumpers for it, which seem to imply some piece of Advanced Formatting is in these drives. Of course, the WD Align software doesn’t recognize these drives as EAR drives.
My plan now is to eliminate the possibility that the Advanced Format issue is my main problem. That means I need a full reformat. Unfortunately, that means transferring about 1.1TB worth of videos to other drives, doing so at the ridiculously slow rate I’m getting right now. I figure that step itself is likely to take me the next 2 or 3 days of constant copying. Once that’s done, I’ll try a reformat with the jumper in place, also doing so without using a striped volume. If that doesn’t dramatically improve the transfer rate, I’m finding 2 new drives. I’m not interested in RMA’ing only to get back 2 equally crappy drives that just drop down to unusable speeds after 3-6 months. I just don’t have it in me to go through moving this amount of data at these slow rates again.
i do weekly backups, i noticed that they took forever on my 1.5tb drive. all my other drives are 1tb green drives and are super quick compared to the busted 1.5tb
i was going to try a full format and write zeros, but it was going to take way too long. i ended up shipping back my drive
I am also having the same problem where the drives slows down (mine slows down for hours at a time) and then speeds up (for about 5-15 minutes). I have 6 of these drives in RAID 5 on ICH10R. At first I thought it was the Intel RAID driver, and then thought it was the OS. But after reading this thread, it sounds like it’s the drives.
Should I RMA the drives? Does WD actually replace your drives with WORKING and RAIDable ones or do they just replace it with the same crappy drive?
Thanks in advance,
Steve
I’ve RMAed 2 of my five. Both drives I received in return were brand new and with a WCAV serial prefix vs the WMAV of the older ones. The 2nd one was also a slighly different model number (see previous post). I ran them both through my previous test, and both performed flawlessly. What I don’t know is if they will exhibit the slowness issue after a few months.
On the plus side, the RMA process was quick and painless (don’t even have to have smart errors, just give a reason) so I’d say go for it - worse case you’re right back where you are now, but with newer drives.
Hi there,
So there is no other way how to fix this issue with active time just to RMA the disc? It could be a bit harder for me since I’m from Slovakia(middle europe). And I also have like 600GB already stored on that disc, that I really don’t want to lose. This HDD is giving me a hard time for 2-3 months.
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