Hello,
I also bought a WD15EARS drive. I’m totally frustrated. If you think to buy a WD drive and you will use Linux and Windows on those disk: LOOOK FOR AN OTHER DEVICE MANUFACTURE! Maybe you are a harddisk expert and you are motivated to invest many hours, than you can do it. I spend more then 20 hours for partition disk in a correct way with(!) a good performance. And I think every poster on this site too.
I tried the performance script from aadamowski and I can conform the performance problem with Linux. Setting the partitions to the correct borders, like suggested, you can’t use the disk with windows XP! The Windows System can not generate a NTFS on the disk.
I found out with the benchmark script from aadamowski, that the 10 time boost just work if your harddisk is configured with “R/W multiple sector transfer” of 16. By default on my Debian/unstable 64bit system (Kernel 2.6.32.7 with util-linux 2.17 it has the value 1. If I set it to 16 with:
hdparm --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing -m 16 /dev/sdb
I’m getting the boost (and I don’t know what I am doing there ;-)).
I will give the device a last try, otherwise I will send it back. It’s just a harddisk (I thougt) 
Regards
Daniel
