WD10EARS: issue as shown on hdtune [ Edited ]

[Zwiter]

Hello,
I am having an issue with my hdd purchased 2 months ago.
I was using it as storage, and as I bought win7, I decided to install the OS on it. So I used my WD10EARS instead of my old WD of 320go 16mo cache.

But it is slower !!

Here is my hd tune result : 2 times with WD10EARS and 1 time with WD320, same config and windows 7.

WD diagnostique and SMART report all is ok.

Do you have any clue about what is going wrong ?

Thx for reading.

Zwiter

[Bill_S]

How did you format it?  If you formatted it on an XP system then the drive is out of alignment and it will run slow, really slow.  You may want to save any data on the drive, then write zeros to it, and then re-partition and reformat it with Windows 7.

[Never]

Is this an issue only if you're running Windows7 on a HD partitioned by XP? Or is this an issue with any HD formatted/partitioned with XP?

This sounds like exactly what I'm dealing with, but I'm running an XP system, I formatted the HD, used XP to partition it, then installed XP.

[Gra_in_Oz]

I also have a hard disc failure warning occurring when using the WD10EARS with Windows 7 Professional (64 Bit).  I purchased the drive less than 2 months ago.  Not happy that the drive seems to be full of bugs and runs slowly??

[fzabkar]

The WD10EARS is a "green" drive. As such, one would expect that performance would not be the primary design goal. Perhaps the AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) setting is conservative, ie maybe the drive is configured for a quiet seek mode.

You can see from the HD Tune access time graphs that the WD10EARS rotates at a lower speed, probably 5900 RPM, whereas the WD3200AAKS is a 7200 RPM drive. This means that the WD10EARS loses about 1 msec in average rotational latency to the older drive.

As for the maximum sustained data rate, one would expect that this value would increase as the square root of the platter density, and decrease in proportion to the RPM. So assuming that the WD10EARS has two 500GB platters, and the WD3200AAKS has two 160GB platters, we would expect that the transfer rate would be ...

78.2 x sqrt (500 / 160) x (5900 / 7200) = 113 MB/s

This figure is in line with your results.

The big dips in the performance graph may be the result of marginal sectors that require several retries. However, I'd confirm that there are no background tasks that could be interfering with the test.