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?