WD15EADS-00P8B0 Really slow? Or am I just crazy?

yes there seem to be a problem with WD15EADS-00P8B0 but WD dont seem to be willing to replace them so all we can hope for is a FW update until then you will have to live with a very slow HDD or hope the store will take it back

Hmmm, this sounds very similiar to my issue.  What was your resolution?  RMA the drive?

I’m getting pretty much the same from a brand new WD20EADS, which seems to be the 2TB version.

I bought this one because I’d read so many bad reviews on the Seagate and Hitachi drives, with people having to RMA them, but it seems Western Digital are just as bad if not worse. 

I would prefer a drive to simply fail early in its life than have a uselessly slow drive with the hope there might be a firmware fix from the manufacturer.

Help !!

I have put in a help ticket on this subject.  Hopefully I get a response tomorrow.  I did some decent analysis and cross compares to see that this performance is WAY out of whack.  I am beginning to think it might have something to do with the drives “Intelliseek” feature.  I heard some things about a program called wdidle3 that I might investigate if I don’t get a good answer back from support.  If all else fails I’m returning the drive.  It took me about 20 Hours to transfer 136 GB (38,000 files) of data from my Raptor Drive to this WD15EADS.  1MB/sec is about the speed I was getting.  This is unacceptable in my opinion.  Good to know I’m not the only one seeing the issue.  I’m not sure if the issue is only on writes or if it is also on reads?  I have been looking at data inside the Windows 7 drive speed tests.

-Tony

I am an A+ certified tech who happened to buy this particular drive for home use. I also have had the same problems with the drive being slow. I of course overlooked the most obvious thing…If you get into device manager and click on that hard drive. In Windows Vista Choose the tab: Policies. When you see the 2 options click on  Optimize for performance. Click OK and it will prompt you to restart the computer. Now i have this in a usb enclosure and this made my speed go through the roof…hence normal operation. I don’t have XP on my PC right now but it should be pretty similar in the steps. I hope this helps! Good Luck!

It looks like I got the same problem too.

I bought couple of WD 1.5 TB external drive (Elements) (WD20EADS-00S2B0) and it was fine when I was backing up my stuff to it through DVD - then out of the blue the whole drive just died. I took it out of the drive enclosure, plug it in using E-SATA and thanked god that it still works, only to discover incredibly slow speed at reading/copying/transfering anything. It would take a GOOD 10 MINUTES to transfer 1.3 GB file. On my other drives (WD non-Green Power ■■■■)  it only took 40 seconds!!!

SO [text deleted]  IS WRONG WITH THIS?I REALLY WANT TO KNOW. NOW NOT ONLY IS MY EXTERNAL HDD NOT WORKING, TAKING IT OUT IT IS STILL A DUD. IT REALLY, REALLY MAKES ME ANGRY WD IS SO IRRESPONSIBLE AT HANDLING THIS. 

AT2ECW,  I tried what u describe, it still does the same thing. I think the WD hardware is just faulty.

I have exactly the same problem here. This performance is just not acceptable, its absolutely awful.

I tried to debug the problem and found that irregularly the drive just jumps to 100% load according to windows7 resource monitor. Funny thing is, an I/O queue builds up but the actual activity on the drive is negligible. Eventually it gets so bad that even downloading a file from the web is slowed by the drives performance :dizzy_face:

As i use this drives in my HTPC its really getting ridiculous. The SSD i use for the OS is out of the question for timeshifting as it simply is to small, so i get freezes when watching tv all the time and the spare drive i have right now is a rather noisy seagate drive that also is not exactly fun to have in a htpc.

I’ve noted similar problems with my new ED15EARS drives.  I’m still attempting to track down if the “advanced format” is causing me issues or not.  In one machine, the drives seem to move fine individually, getting 76MB/s transfer rates.  in another, they slow down to about ~10MB/s.  These aren’t the painfully slow speeds that others are describing, but I’m wondering if they might be related.  The 64k buffer of the EARS series might stave off some of the problem, but not all. Additionally, I haven’t fully tested if it was related to the RAID1 setup I initially started these drives in.  Its possible that might have something to do with my particular problem.

I disabled the power saving features of Win7 (i.e.  Disk sleep after 20 minutes) though it seems odd that would cause any problems immediately.  And…if the drive is transfering data…then it wouldn’t exactly be idle.  That could be a problem with either the HDD reporting or windows software detecting.

Also, since it is an advanced format drive, I was concerned that perhaps the factory “alignment” of the sectors wasn’t done correctly.  I’ll have to research the WD tool to verify, but it would be nice if Win7 could tell you that outright.

The only other obvious differencse are that the machine which is slower is an ICH9R system running 64bit Win7, while the “fast” machine is ICH10R system running 32bit Win7.

Has anyone run the alignment utility on a newer OS to see if everything is in order?  Is there any reason a “Quick” format might cause issues while a standard format would not?  In my case, it seems that if one of the alignments was out of sync with the other, then a RAID would suffer problems.  of course, as of now neither windows nor the intel RAID software report problems, but then again they might not know how to deal with alignment issues.

I also wonder if the factory might have applied the advanced format alignment to some of the EADS drives…and therefore screwed them up as well.

I’m sure WD is aware of the problem, the question is just how deep it runs, and whether or not they are scrambling to resolve it.  If we are a minor subset, they might consider it worth the cost of RMAs or lost customers…but if if is a larger problem with their Advanced Format implementation, then they might have a bigger problem on their hands when all drives shift to the new format.

My initial research into the problem also took me to Microsoft Windows forums, and users reporting the problem as a major Win7 bug.  I will have to go back and look at some of the posts to see if WD drives are involved.

EDIT:  Having placed this drive in the other machine, my speed problems appear to be tied to their usage in RAID.  Peformance is adequate when the drives are used standalone.

Sorry, I realize this doesn’t exacly help folks, but I thought I would share my results

It is aggrevating to know that WD intentionally disables settings on a perfectly good drive to force you to pay more for their “RAID”/Enterprise drives.  Why can’t us HTPC users with minimal performance demands take advantage of the best GB/$ ratios AND get a drive that can RAID properly?

I am having similiar problems with this disk in a Linux system.

The disk simply goes to 100% utilisation, with almost no actual io happening, so anything you try to do takes ages.

The iostat utility on Linux shows;

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util

sda               0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00     0.00     0.00     0.00     7.00    0.00   0.00 100.00

I have 2 identical disks in the same machine, so i am going to try cloning and swapping them and seeing if the problem follows the disk.

Problem disk is;

  Model Number:       WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0

  Serial Number:      WD-WMAVU0046239

  Firmware Revision:  01.00A01

  Transport:          Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6

yes the 00P8B0-disk is useless, but WD doesnt see any problem with a writespeed at 1MB/sec…

Im hoping for a firmwareupdate for tthis.

 This kind a ignorance from WD wont be forgotten by endusers like me and others I think…

Yesterday I swapped the disks by cloning the problem disk (using ddrecover) onto the 2nd disk and then swapping them.  After a short time the problem re-occurred on the 2nd disk, confirming that the problem is the disk not something in the system or software.  I have removed the fautly disk and after 2 months of pain the system is now running perfectly. 

So, just to clarify, the symptom was that the system suddenly ran very slowly for periods of 5-15mins every few hours.  Further examination showed that the disk was doing very little IO, but reported 100% utilisation.

The two disks are identical, purchased aty the same time from the same supplier, both

  Model Number:       WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0

  Firmware Revision:  01.00A01

One disk had a fault where it intermitantly ran slowly, the other is fine.

Hope this helps somebody.

WD, do you want my faulty disk???

“I bought couple of WD 1.5 TB external drive (Elements) (WD20EADS-00S2B0) and it was fine when I was backing up my stuff to it through DVD - then out of the blue the whole drive just died. I took it out of the drive enclosure, plug it in using E-SATA and thanked god that it still works, only to discover incredibly slow speed at reading/copying/transfering anything. It would take a GOOD 10 MINUTES to transfer 1.3 GB file. On my other drives (WD non-Green Power ■■■■)  it only took 40 seconds!!!”

I had the EXACT same experience. This is apparently by design. Hopefully someone from WD will make a public statement. This is complete garbage 4k sector bull bleep. I thought my brand new disk was dying, which was bad enough, but to know that now my replacement drive will probably do the exact same thing? hella lame!

I too thought i would give WD a try after buying seagate for years. Monoculture and all that, but this is just a complete atrocity.



i’m also having this exact same issue with my 1.5TB WD hard drive.  it worked great for a few months then i started noticing that it was taking longer and longer to write files to the drive.
sometimes it would take 30 seconds to browse folders in windows explorer
also, when transferring files to the drive, the progress showing time would bounce around.  looking at the drive in hd sentinel, it has no errors, just incredibly slow write speeds.  sometimes it will stay at 1kBps

for the most part, reading from the drive will work fine.  sometimes it slows down.  also, i’ve noticed that when i boot windows (xp), it will sit at a black screen for 30 extra seconds when the drive is connected.  it never used to do this.

i guess i’ll RMA the drive

Maybe you’re experiencing the well known partition alignment problems related to 4096 byte physical sectors of those drives.

Try partitioning the drives with a proper offset (divisible by 8) like described in this discussion:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Problem-with-WD-Advanced-Format-drive-in-LINUX-WD15EARS/td-p/6395

well, my drive is a WD15EADS, I’ve read that only the EARS hard drives have the 4k issues

You are correct that EARS drives are the only Advanced Format drives from WD (at this time).  However, it is possible that the drives are similar enough and prone to the same QA failures.  They might even be made in the same factory where union inspector “Q47” (or something similar, lol) is simply collecting a paycheck and not paying attention.  My WD10EADS-00Z5B1 drive is working fine.  Then again, I didn’t try to RAID that one.  If I had, I might have sent it back too for failure to perform a vital disk function.

Seriously, what’s so hard about just making the drive spin slower to make it green and that’s it?  Don’t muck with other setting that jepordize its RAIDability. Maybe give it more cache so it can peform better on large video writes, thereby taking less time to spin…and kazam…you’ve got a “lower power” drive that can still do its job.  Didn’t all drives used to spin at 5400RPM or less?  Seriously…who lost the recipie for making ice?

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.