This is a brand new drive exhibiting these issues right out of the box.
The reads and writes are sub par, but made worse by the continue stop and start nature of the operations. In other words, there is a half second of activity followed by a second of inactivity. The constant spikes in the graphs from DisckMark and HDTune illustrate that (inserted below). Out of the box, I connected the drive to a Win7 x64 laptop using a SATA-to-USB adaptor and used Windows to create a single partition and format it. I’ve connected the drive via SATA-to-USB and SATA-to-eSTAT to 2 different Win7 x64 laptops. I’ve installed it internally (SATA port on the MB) on an XP x64 desktop. All connection methods exhibit the same issue. I’ve reformatted the drive several times as well. My other SATA drives perform just fine in the same configurations. From what I gather, this is not an AF drive either. So I shouldn’t have an issue with partition alignment. There are no SMART errors, HDTune’s error scan didn’t find anything, Window’s error scan didn’t find anything, and the Extended Test in Lifeguard found nothing either.
Am I missing something or is this a defective drive?
Drive labeled as: WD5000AZRX-00A8LB0
Retail box labeled as: WDBAAY5000ENC-NRSN
This was when the drive was installed internally. CrystalDiskMark would crash the PC upon launching when the drive was installed internally. HDTune would not open after 30 minutes; so I’d have to kill the process.
This was when the drive was connected via USB.
