WD 1.5TB Green drives - Useful as door stops

Well I got two 1 terabyte versions running on an ubuntu machine and hey were slow as snails with lots of data corruption.

I tried 15 cables from four different manufacturers and nothing helped. I even tried a different 800 W powersupply. I did get a workaround for ubuntu by limiting the data transfer rates to 3Gbps in the /etc/default/grub.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=“libata.force=3.0Gbps”

then:
sudo update-grub2
sudo update-initramfs -u

Now the drives are fast with no errors:

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   6980 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3491.37 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  396 MB in  3.01 seconds = 131.44 MB/sec

The errors were:

[13873.934590] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[13873.934684] ata3.00: failed command: READ MULTIPLE
[13873.934789] ata3.00: cmd c4/00:08:

90:d3:eb/00:00:00:00:00/e6 tag 0 pio 4096 in
[13873.934804] res 58/00:07:91:d3:eb/84:01:06:00:00/e6 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
[13873.934957] ata3.00: status: { DRDY DRQ }
[13873.935027] ata3: soft resetting link
[13874.105263] ata3.00: configured for PIO0
[13874.105335] ata3: EH complete
[13874.114626] ata3: drained 65536 bytes to clear DRQ.
[13874.174559] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[13874.174652] ata3.00: failed command: READ MULTIPLE
[13874.174756] ata3.00: cmd c4/00:08:90:d3:eb/00:00:00:00:00/e6 tag 0 pio 4096 in
[13874.174772] res 58/00:07:91:d3:eb/84:01:06:00:00/e6 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
[13874.174924] ata3.00: status: { DRDY DRQ }
[13874.174995] ata3: soft resetting link
[13874.345499] ata3.00: configured for PIO0
[13874.345571] ata3: EH complete

Perhaps this can be fixed with a new firmware.

acronis the more likely culprit. they were the reason i chose to buy back up software instead of using the free one. any company that makes newer versions of backup software not backward compatible gets my vote for a company to steer clear of. also had plenty of other problems with their stuff