WD Raptor 10,000rpm - Performance Problems

[NotoriousTAT6]

I think I may need a little help on this one... Earlier this week I purchased an oem WD Raptor 36gb 10,000rpm drive. I decided to reformat all my drives and use the Raptor as my system drive for XP. Since doing so I have noticed quite a lag in performance. Transfer rates given by 2 seperate benchmarking programs show the Raptor more that 12mb/s behind my other drives in transfer speed along with a 17.9s access time which is more than 7 seconds slower than my next slowest drive. The difference is even noticable during basic windows operations.
I have DFI LanParty NFII Ultra motherboard and I have looked through all manuals and FAQ for a solution. The bios settings have been checked and rechecked over and over again. Even Western Dig provides no help. Based on the info I will soon provide can you guys let me know if I am missing something or is it a problem with the actual drive.

My basic setup is
amd 2700+ oc'd 2800
Cooler Master Aero 7+
DFI LanParty NFII Ultra
2 x 512mb OCZ PC3200 Enhanced Latency
MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4200
Western Digital 36GB 10,000 8mb cache (SATA)
Maxtor 60GB 7200 2mb cache
Western Digital 60GB 7200 2mb cache
2 x Maxtor 120GB 7200 8mb cache (Raid)
16x DVD
52x CD-RW

The curreny drive setup is as follows:
Primary Master: WD Raptor - (via SATA: uses the primary channel)
Primary Slave: Maxtor 60GB
Secondary Master: WD 60GB
Secondary Slave: 16x DVD
Raid: 2x Maxtor 120GB

Pleas help me if you can

 

[Viper96720]

What's it like if that's the only drive connected?

 

[Insane3D]

I've heard there is an issue where you can only use the SATA ports or the extra IDE ports...not both at the same time... Not sure though...

 

[Double Trouble]

Sounds like you might have gotten one of the units with the write caching disabled. A firmware upgrade of the drive should do the trick, but I don't know if WD will send you the firmware upgrade and utils you need to flash it.

If all else fails, you might have to return the drive to the vendor, though it's pretty likely they'll just tell you the drive is working "fine".

I have a raptor as my system drive, with several RAID arrays for storage, as well as another IDE drive on 'regular' IDE channels, and it's all working happily together, so I'm guessing it's not an issue of not being able to run drives in that configuration.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: NotoriousTAT6
I think I may need a little help on this one... Earlier this week I purchased an oem WD Raptor 36gb 10,000rpm drive. I decided to reformat all my drives and use the Raptor as my system drive for XP. Since doing so I have noticed quite a lag in performance. Transfer rates given by 2 seperate benchmarking programs show the Raptor more that 12mb/s behind my other drives in transfer speed along with a 17.9s access time which is more than 7 seconds slower than my next slowest drive. The difference is even noticable during basic windows operations.
I have DFI LanParty NFII Ultra motherboard and I have looked through all manuals and FAQ for a solution. The bios settings have been checked and rechecked over and over again. Even Western Dig provides no help. Based on the info I will soon provide can you guys let me know if I am missing something or is it a problem with the actual drive.

My basic setup is
amd 2700+ oc'd 2800
Cooler Master Aero 7+
DFI LanParty NFII Ultra
2 x 512mb OCZ PC3200 Enhanced Latency
MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4200
Western Digital 36GB 10,000 8mb cache (SATA)
Maxtor 60GB 7200 2mb cache
Western Digital 60GB 7200 2mb cache
2 x Maxtor 120GB 7200 8mb cache (Raid)
16x DVD
52x CD-RW

The curreny drive setup is as follows:
Primary Master: WD Raptor - (via SATA: uses the primary channel)
Primary Slave: Maxtor 60GB
Secondary Master: WD 60GB
Secondary Slave: 16x DVD
Raid: 2x Maxtor 120GB

Pleas help me if you can

I would disconnect all the other drives and see if this fixes the problem, there may be a master/slave issue between the SATA and PATA controllers.

 

[NotoriousTAT6]

Well I went a ahead and tried some of your suggestions. I disconnected all hard drives reformated the WD Raptor and re-installed windows with Only the Raptor and 16x dvd installed, yet I still have the same performance problem. Windows open noticeably slower, my computer browsing is delayed instead of instant results I used to get. I once again checked FAQ for WD and DFI and I came up with nothing. Do you think its time to send back that harddrive or maybe the motherboard or is there some other possible solution. I would appriciate some more suggestions.

 

[Viper96720]

Is the drivers up to date

 

[Viper96720]

checked if dma was enabled

 

[Murr]

RMA that sucka. You paid a lot of money for a drive thats supposed to be very fast. It is not working fine.