I bought 2 Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 6 drives (1TB) a couple weeks ago from Newegg. I installed the first and used it as the boot drive for running Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) on my HTPC platform which consists of:
Asus AT5ION-I motherboard
4GB (2x2GB) Kingston SO-DIMMs
WD 1TB SATA6 Caviar Black (the one that died)
WD 1TB Caviar Black SATA 3 drive (data)
Everything worked fine for about 4 days. Then Windows would not boot in less than 45 minutes. Once up, every action took 45 minutes or more. I rebooted and it would not load Wwindows at all.
I replaced the SATA6 drive with a known working drive (Seagate 400GB SATA3) and reloaded the OS. Testing of the WD SATA6 drive failed in ATTO, HDTUNE, SiSoft Sandra. It wouldn’t even format in Disk Manager in Windows on this system. (it did, however, format on my other system…though it took 8 hours to perform a " quick" format(?!?!?!)
I RMA’d it and today after work, I am picking up the drive WD sent me as a replacement.
While I was going through the RMA process I installed the second drive I ordered. I used it in my eSATA docking station and it worked fine for about 5 days. Then, I tried watching a TV Program I recorded to it and Media Player hung up. I then tried to copy the file from the SATA6 drive to the 400GB SATA 3 drive and it took forever to copy.
This second drive will not pass a basic HDTune test. It fails ATTO. It will not pass a SiSoft Sandra HDD Test. All 3 tests abort with a Read Error.
Although it is not yet completely unusable, it is dying. I am trying my best to move my files off of it prior to initiating the RMA on it, but it is taking forever to move any data. It took 4hrs to move 20GB from it to my other drive. (from eSATA to internal SATA drive)
Second system
Asus P5Q Pro Turbo
Q9650
8GB Kingston DDR2
(3) WD SATA3 Caviar Black Drives (Intel Matrix RAID 0 and 1)
My Western Digital SATA3 drives are working like a champ. I’ve had ZERO problems with them. Love 'em.
These SATA6 drives, however, seem to need some more work…
Will be RMA’ing the 2nd drive tonight, just wanted to let you guys at WD know what the symptoms were…
