@ 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 ■■■■), 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!
