Inconsistent WD Blacks (WD5002AALX)

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Greetings everyone,

I have been using a pair of WD5002AALX drives in RAID0 now for a month or so, and so far, it’s been a nightmare. I kept trying to figure out what was destroying my R/W speeds, and part of it was AMD’s drivers for my motherboard, but aside from that. Still, more issues.

A few hours ago, I seperated them from RAID, and disabled the RAID-BIOS, went back into standard AHCI. Reinstalled Windows 7 (ON A DIFFERENT DRIVE), and the AHCI root driver from AMD. Think I may have found my issue, but it doesn’t make sense, so here I am.

Neither of my blacks are formatted, or partitioned currently. Bare metal drives. HDTune speeds for one of them is 30MB/s average difference, on both read and write, as if something were seriously wrong with the drive hardware. Yet, both have completely normal and safe SMART reports, as if they were fine. They are -extremely- inconsistent, the HDTune graph is a very, very jagged line for the drive with the lower average speed. The other drive is -fairly- consistent.

I am seriously considering RMA if possible, but what on earth could be the cause to this? I have tried different motherboard ports, SATA cables, and SATA power cables. Also really OCD about my computer being as bug-free-as-possible in the hardware department.

Any help would be REALLY appreciated.

As a side note: both WD Blacks were purchased from Amazon at the same time, both have the exact same extended model numbers, and both have the same manufacturing date. My current drive used for Windows 7 and testing my blacks with HDTune is a WD Blue 250 that has been good ol’ faithful (and apparently will be for a little bit at least, now)

2

Explain This to WD like you eplain here.

you have covered all the basic tests… your drive isnt fine

just do one thing , disconect the  good black drive and connect that one… and see if the problem continues… if so RMA your drive, if not may be a power supply fault

3

Thanks then, I will be contacting WD for an RMA then. It definitely isn’t a power supply issue, it’s always the same drive affected, and my power supply is only roughly 50% loaded even when the computer is fully loaded. Always good to have a little overkill in that department right? Silverstone Strider ST1500, and I tried various SATA power connectors, so it isn’t just a bad plug.

Will the warranty be honored if the drive still passes SMART though? Because it says it’s fine, but it’s transfer speed suggests the opposite.

4

you can RMSA if you do not feel confident storing your data in the drive, you can send a picture of the graphs just to be sure and a little explanation

but i think you will not having problems acceptiong your rma