Hi all, I decided on the new Caviar black WD5002AALX hard drive. It also has a 32mb cache. I’m getting a poor burst rate with it though…typically around 70MB/s. In comparison to my WD2500JS, its has almost double the transfer speed, but this burst speed has me concerned.
This WD2500JS gets around 130mb/s burst.
I also had a WD5000AAKS with a 16mb cache and it performed better and had a fast (120ish) burst rate.
I only have a SATA II interface so I tried both with the jumped on and off to throttle the SATA interface but it didn’t change the burst rate.
Any ideas? Should this be normal? Is it possible my older MB doesn’t like the 32mb cache. I would maybe think its chipset drivers but the WD2500JS seems to be fine in the same computer.
The WD2500 is a secondary drive so maybe that’s why the CPU is lower on those tests?
I didn’t see any new firmware on the WD site but I’m not sure where to look on there.
UPDATE: put the 2500 in as the boot drive and got similar burst speed results…so maybe this is normal?
