WD15EARS problem

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I would like your help for a WD15EARS I bought because from WD official support I received no answer.

I partitioned and I formatted the disk in Windows Vista SP2 x64 and the drive worked in that system for test purpose for 2 days.

Then I put the drive in my 2nd system which is Windows XP SP3 x86. Windows Disk Management recognized the disk but with RAW format  and no data on it even it had about 400GB of data and needed to reformat it.

After I formatted it, I wrote some data on it and put it back in Vista, which saw it without a problem and with data.

I formatted the disk again, I wrote some data and then I put it back in XP.

This time XP saw the disk formatted and with data. Now for more than 3 weeks works in my XP system with no problem but with a very slow transfer speed (especially in file move/copy).

Because I need another 2 x 1.5TB disks also for storage and because I am afraid of that strange behaviour after the first format I don’t know if it would be better to try another disk.

I forgot to tell you that WD Alignment utility either in Vista or XP saw that the disk is aligned and no further alignment was necessary.

I would appreciate your opinion and help.

2

Once the disk is aligned you should be fine, unless you delete the partition or write zeroes to it.  Now if you formatted the drive in GPT partition, that’s probably why XP didn’t see it.  You will need to format it in MBR for XP to see it.

3

I formatted the disk as MBR NTFS, so that’s why I am afraid of the Advanced Format disks, 1st because XP didn’t see the format correctly and 2nd because of the very low transfer rate.

Thank you for your answer.