WD20EARSx2; one good, one bad?

I’ve just installed 2 x WD20EARS drives into a P965 based Windows 7 system.

One works fine, the other appears to be excrutiatingly slow.

CDM sequential read/write speeds show upwards of 100Mb/s on drive A, whereas drive B only manages between 2.5 and 10Mb/s read and around 1.5Mb/s write.

Both were initialised and formatted in the same way in Windows 7 Disk Management, as a basic disk with a single partition with 4096k allocation units.

I’ve tried a number of different (known good) SATA cables and ports on the motherboard, nothing changes.

If I remove the partition from drive B and run the Paragon Alignment Tool drive A shows as aligned.

If I attempt to run the Alignment tool when drive B is partitioned it appears to hang at ‘Getting partitions info…’. I’ve waited a max of around 20 minutes so far before killing the process, I’ve not yet tried waiting longer.

Somewhat confusingly, running the WD Diagnostics on drive B everything passes. If I write zero’s to the drive it writes at around 80Mb/s.

I tried performing the quick erase but it didn’t help, even just partitioning drive  B in Disk Management afterwards is slow.

I’ll be leaving it overnight to do the full erase as it’s reckoning on around 5 or 6 hours to zero the entire drive.

It looks like everything points to a faulty drive, however the full erase being able to write at 80Mb/s throws doubt in my mind.

If anyone has any thoughts before I place an RMA I would be most grateful.

Thanks,

Ade.

Edited to add:

Whilst the Alignment Tool is ‘Getting partitions info…’ from drive B (30 minutes or so now), Resource Monitor shows drive B as 100% active, with the pat.exe process reading at a miniscule 2 to 3kb/s.

Edited again to add:

Requested an RMA from the supplier, it’s going back.

You might try the other Align utility. There are 2 or 3 WD offers now. But yes, an RMA works too.