Hello,
I know that this issue has been discussed here many times, but I’ve searched the forum and tried various suggestions, all with no success. I’m just trying to discover whether I didn’t miss some solution.
The problem is as follows:
We have bought two WD20EARS disks for our computing server to serve as a data storage (and one Velociraptor for system installation). Initially, we did run them in a Windows Server 2008 R2 software RAID (RAID 1) and did experience performance that was nothing short of awful. The transfer speeds from the RAID to the Velociraptor was around 30 MB/s which is slow, but still acceptable, however, write speeds never exceed 5-6 MB/s, often fell even under 1 MB/s, which is not acceptable at all.
I thought that the problem is, that it is just the Windows RAID that is performing poorly, so I disabled the RAID, removed one of the disks, reformatted the other and tried if the speeds got any better… and it didn’t. Therefore I think that the problem is either in the drive itself or in combination of the drive and motherboard.
The computer itself is a fairly powerful machine running 4 AMD Opteron 6128 processors, 64 GB RAM, all settled in a Supermicro H8QGL-iF+ motherboard. In the BIOS, the disks are set to operate in AMD_AHCI mode, which I assume should be correct. In Windows, the drivers for the SATA controller are updated to the latest version. I used a standard formatting tool in Windows 2008 Server R2 with default settings, which should be OK as per WD suggestion in the FAQ. I also tried to run the WD align utility, but it says that the disk is correctly aligned.
Finally, I’ve run the WD Diagnostics utlity and the drive passed all the test, that is: SMART test, QUICK test and even the EXTENDED test.
So my question is - is there anything more I could try before dumping the drives and buying another ones (or try to RMA the disks)?
Thanks for all suggestions!