[techtype]

I have three of these Western Digital WD800JB 8 Meg cache 7200 (Special Edition) drives. I noticed that one of them benchmarks slower than the other two. (43,000 kB/s versus 50,000)This is not a computer or controller issue, as I have tested in different computers. I've been using the drive for 6 months and it works without errors and passes the diagnostics. It makes me wonder though. Should I try to RMA the drive?

[XtremeMaC]

if its 43 kB/s u should but if its 43MB/s its okay

80 GB Hard Drive WD800JB
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal) 
Buffer Size 8 MB 
Buffer To Disk 602.0 Mbits/s (Max) 
Read Seek Time (Average) 8.9 ms 
Write Seek Time (Average) 10.9 ms (average) 
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average) 
Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average) 
Average Latency 4.2 ms (nominal) 
Mode 5 Ultra ATA 100.0 MB/s
Mode 4 Ultra ATA 66.6 MB/s
Mode 2 Ultra ATA 33.3 MB/s 
Mode 4 PIO 16.6 MB/s 
Mode 2 multi-word DMA 16.6 MB/s

it might have some issues..with this mode's.
also maybe does the slower one have system files on it? or are u testing them blank? also are they on different contollers or did u test them at the same controller, same cable same ide port one at a time?

[techtype]

Yeah, I left out a few 0s (edited them in now) (43,000 kB/s versus 50,000)

Same controller, port, cable, etc. It's annoying, but I guess I can live with it.

[XtremeMaC]

well if u believe its not working properly rma it
I did it with my western digital 120GB 8MB cache drive.
nothing was reporting wrong but my fat table kept deleting it self (no virus) i sent it back they looked at it and said there is nothing wrong with it. anyways they sent a new one working charm..

(ps. I didn't buy it from western digital I bought it from caloptic.com and returned it to them. after that I dunno what happened.)

[Aaron]

techtype, I have the same issue. a WD 8mb cache 120gb on master and a 200 on slave. Exact same spec, just bigger in capacity and slower on the slave.

Here's a graph:



Bench 1. WD 120GB: 47.0 MB/s
Bench 2. WD 120GB Burst: 70.5 MB/s

Bench 3. WD 200GB: 53.0 MB/s
Bench 4: WD 200GB Burst: 59.0 MB/s

The results are very irregular. Notice how the last bench resulted in a straight line? Looked like it was struggling to do more but something was limiting its speed.

[techtype]

What are you benchmarking with? I'm using diskspeed32. I can only speculate that the motors have a wide variance in speed, Im guessing that some like ours don't really hit 7200 rpm.

[Aaron]

I'm using HD_speed from Steelbytes