I just purchased an WD advanced format 2TB drive (WD20EARS). I am using it with Debian 4 on an old Pentium 2 computer. It is really slow. I set it up using fdisk -u and starting the partition at 64 and then using MKFS to format an ext3 filesystem specifying a blocksize of 4096. Unfortunately that did not avoid the performance issue. Does anybody have any ideas? Should I try resetting the jumpers to turn off 4k blocksize? I am trying to decide if I should RMA the drive.
Here is how I can tell the drives are slow. The system has an IDE system drive 12GB w/about 6GB free. It also has a 1TB SATA WD internal drive (WD10EACS). I have added the new 2TB SATA WD (WD20EARS) advanced format drive externally via eSATA. I intend to replace the 1TB drive with the 2TB driver. I copied the data from the 89% full 1TB drive to the new 2TB drive. It took days at under 4MB/s. So I decided to compare the performance of the 1TB and the 2TB. I copied a 5GB file from the 1TB to the IDE drive which averaged about 8MB/s and copying the same file from the 2TB to the IDE drive averaged only 2.9MB/s. Tried copying the file from the IDE drive to the 1TB at about 9MB/s, and from the IDE drive to the 2TB at about 2.9MB/s.
-Stew
