New Western Digital drive performance

[Nemesis]

Last week I picked up one of the 80Gb Western Digital WD800JB's from OCUK, on this week only. I installed it into the system in my sig as "master with slave present" on IDE2, with the Plextor CDRW as slave. One FDISK later, and my new drive is ready for data. My intention is to use the WD as my main drive, relegating the IBM 60GXP to a data drive.

All OK so far. I bought this drive because everyone (OCUK, Storage review, EXHardware) raves about the performace. So I ran the Sandra 2002 file system benchmark, and was disappointed to see only 24000 - bearing in mind that this review (http://www.exhardware.com/reviews.php?Id=88) got over 31000. At that, I had other things to do so left it until last night. Fired up the machine, ran the same benchmark - results now 32316, in line with the above review figures. Rebooted, same again. Fab, working now.

So - I kicked off a Drive Image 4.0 disk to disk copy, left it running overnight. This morning, benched the WD again, now with data on it - 24000 again. Rebooted, same.

Why? Is this a duff drive / cable? All my drives are connected using OCUK round 90cm ATA-100 cables. The IBM benches at around 23000 all the time. I know Sandra is a "synthetic" benchmark, but this is quite a margin of difference.

Checkdisk says the drive is OK, and my BIOS and windows say it's fine. Is there a driver for this drive, as it's got a huge 8Mb buffer? All I got (and expected) was the drive in bubble wrap.

Any advice or ideas would be welcome, as that performance hike is pretty good...

[druga runda]

I have the same drive, never tested it, however my feeling is that if FLIES compared to my 1 yr old 40GB Maxtor 7200 rpm. ;)

I like it that is for sure, as for the error - ??? no idea.

[Spectral]

Well, consider yourself lucky to get even that.

I have 2 40 gig WD7200RPM drives raided.. The most Ive ever scored in Sandra 2002 is 37,650.

And thats always after a defrag... If I use my PC for a week and retest... My same config gets 22,000... Less than a single nonraided 20gig 7200rpm.

[Nemesis]

Just for information - I used the WD Data Life Guard disk last night - blitzed the existing partition, copied my C:\ drive partition over, and presto! All working, scores around 32000 in Sandra 2002 consistently. It seems that FDISK, and partition magic don't work well on these drives, but the DLG suite works very well.

I must say that these drives go like stink, very quick, my machine is noticeably brisker now.

We live and learn...

[Essense]

I just hope it last longer then mine did, I had a 100 GB WD die on me in 3 months, then the reconditioned replacement died in less then 2 weeks. After that I said to hell with it, they arnt worth the trouble, I could send it back, and spend 20 bucks on shipping that way they can send me another reconditioned POS, that will die in less then a month, but im going to vote with my wallet. I'll never buy WD again. As for performance, yeah it was extremely fast, however not *that* much faster then the Maxtor DX740 that im using now.

Regards,
Mike

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by Essense
I just hope it last longer then mine did, I had a 100 GB WD die on me in 3 months, then the reconditioned replacement died in less then 2 weeks. After that I said to hell with it, they arnt worth the trouble, I could send it back, and spend 20 bucks on shipping that way they can send me another reconditioned POS, that will die in less then a month, but im going to vote with my wallet. I'll never buy WD again. As for performance, yeah it was extremely fast, however not *that* much faster then the Maxtor DX740 that im using now.

Regards,
Mike

I had the same problems with WD. Original drive died and two other replacements died after that. I switched to Maxtor and was very happy with it until I upgraded to my present 80 gig Seagate, which has been a pinnacle of reliability, quality and performance.

[joltcola]

I've always seen forum posts, stating that their WD died on them in the first 5 months of operation, and even hurd IBM's HD having problems too. But i've got both an WD and an IBM HD, that have been running smooth for some time now. Is this possibly due to different HD being manufactured in different locations? Or , not enough testing of their products?

Does anyone have some nfo on this?

Oh, yeah, the WD and IBM's HD came with the systems, but any system I've ever built or maintain, have Maxtors in them. They are definatly reliable imo, and I've only had one go out on me in the last two years under a heavy work load. If I buy another HD for whatever reason, I'd most likely go with Maxtor.

More of my opinion! =)

-- Jolt Cola