Legit Reviews

I'm having some troubles with my new HDD. I picked up a 1.5 TB WD Caviar Black from NewEgg, and it was a pain in the arse to get the BIOS to see it. Well, it's seeing it, Windows sees it, I can read and write from it. But I've noticed performance issues... I decided to run HD Tune and see what was going on.... Let me know what you think I should do. The second screenshot is my 7200.11 Seagate 500 GB HDD.

why is your cpu usage so high? (doesnt matter performance-wise i ran the test with 6cores 98% stress (folding) then again with 0% usage with no change, just curious as it seems to be above 25% each time for you (one core of four stressed? + the ~3% for the test))

just ran my empty WD Cav Black 1TB from 12/2008: what are your writes like? ATTO?

What's the problem? Seems like it's running as it should. The drive will get slower as it gets to the outside area of the platters. HD Tune is taking the average of the speed from the inside to the outside. What issues were you having when you first installed it?

Skier, I'm honestly not sure. I wasn't really watching the benchmarks. hehe

This is all on a 100% fresh install of Windows 7 Professional, which I installed on my 60GB OCZ Agility 2. I have no performance issues on any of my drives, but the WD Caviar Black. It jumps up and down so bad, and I don't feel it should. My other 3 physical drives don't and my SSD only jumps here and there, but is very constant otherwise. I've noticed that the write speeds are pretty slow, when copying from one drive to the next, plus when I went to create a folder on the drive, it took 15 seconds for it to pop up. When moving 60GB worth of data from the Seagate to the WD, it was averaging about 20 MB/s. I just tried a copy of 1.2 GB from the Seagate to the Western Digital, and it averaged about 65 MB/s that time. What is scaring me about this, is the BIOS used to lag hard when trying to see the drive. It still does pause momentarily on my 2nd SATA device, but usually bypasses it now. I have moved it from SATA 5, to 3, to 2.... all with the same problem.

I want to point out the average read is 67.8 MB/s on the Caviar, but my 3 year old Seagate is faster. The minimum shouldn't be 10.1 MB/s either.. That is my other big concern, big dips in read performance.

I couldn't get the "write" test to run. It kept telling me to delete my partition... in which there is only the 1 on that drive, and I wasn't about to remove 60GB worth of data off of it to run the test. hehe

i would try to Full reformat it to be honest, the drive should perform exactly like mine, maybe you need to set it to 4K sectors instead of 512byte? the only time i've experienced the bios not seeing a drive or really lagging at post is when my momentus XT had a firmware update failure, so i'd also try to update firmware (it failed to format just yesterday actually, and i just updated it in a different pc and it works great again)

(i got this 1TB yesterday, 2nd hand and welcomed it to my PC with a full format (instead of Quick Format) had to format because the prev. owner had the drive name in chinese lol)

I actually did update the BIOS, thinking that was my issue w/ the POST lagging when trying to detect it, but no dice. I'll try a full reformat in a few moments. I'm just moving the data from this WD to a Seagate for the time being.

My ultimate goal is to have:

1x 60 GB SSD - OS Only Drive
1x 1.5 TB - General Storage (Games, downloads, etc.)
2x 500 GB - put into RAID (1) configuration (To back up my photography stuff, music, etc.)
1x 37GB Raptor - I'll probably ditch this and put it into another system, or if the performance of this truly outdoes the Caviar Black, I'll put a game or two on it, that I play often.

The full format is only about 50% complete since my last posting (3 hours ago). Boy is this dragging. LOL!

If anything this sounds like a controller issue to me. What southbridge does your computer have? Have you tried looking for updated chipset drivers?

NAiLs wrote:1x 37GB Raptor - I'll probably ditch this and put it into another system, or if the performance of this truly outdoes the Caviar Black, I'll put a game or two on it, that I play often.

what, the SATA I original raptor? i have a 74GB raptor and its only like 70MB/s, our TB drives are each over 100MB/s

Major_A wrote:If anything this sounds like a controller issue to me. What southbridge does your computer have? Have you tried looking for updated chipset drivers?

Here is what CPU-Z says about the chipset:
There is only one chipset driver from 9/18/09, and I'm pretty sure it's what I have installed even on my other installation of W7.

skier wrote:

NAiLs wrote:1x 37GB Raptor - I'll probably ditch this and put it into another system, or if the performance of this truly outdoes the Caviar Black, I'll put a game or two on it, that I play often.

what, the SATA I original raptor? i have a 74GB raptor and its only like 70MB/s, our TB drives are each over 100MB/s

Yea, this is the original Raptor and I'm pretty sure it is slow to today's standards. hehe


Format is complete on the 1.5 TB HDD, so I'll test again tomorrow.

Try updating the Intel Rapid Storage software.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/SearchR ... %AE+RST%29

*EDIT*
Are you running RAID or AHCI now? If not you'll have to activate one or the other to install that software. Here's a guide to turning on AHCI without having to reinstall Windows in Vista or 7.
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=313676

Major_A wrote:Try updating the Intel Rapid Storage software.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/SearchR ... %AE+RST%29

*EDIT*
Are you running RAID or AHCI now? If not you'll have to activate one or the other to install that software. Here's a guide to turning on AHCI without having to reinstall Windows in Vista or 7.
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=313676

I'll have to check that out. I was playing around and enabled AHCI (I quite honestly don't understand this mode), and Windows kept blue screening during boot. All I know about AHCI is it brings out advanced features of SATA, like hot swap. Thanks for the guide on how to enable it w/o reinstalling W7! I'll peep that in a bit along w/ the Intel Rapid Storage software.

Ok... so I just got done reformatting, enabling AHCI and editing the registry, and installing that Intel Rapid Storage driver... and I must say, I'm much more imressed! Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The tips and help were much appreciated!!!! I was going nuts seeing a brand new drive have so many problems, only to find out... it was user error! hehe



Also, for the fun of it, I ran the benchmark on my SSD. I didn't see much of a performance improvement, but the little bit was definitely welcome!

IDE Mode: AHCI Mode:



P.S. The Raptor is definitely going away! That puppy is horribly slow compared to this new WD Caviar Black!

One last thing that I noticed. The transfer rate from my Seagate to the WD is now improved significantly! I'm transferring all of the data that I previously put on it, and it's going at roughly 85-100 MB/s. Yay!!!!!! I'm happy once again!

Probably helped a lot with the NCQ and the large cache on the hard drive. Glad it's working to specs now.