EADS is AFAIK not an advanced format (4K) disk (as opposed to EARS which is), so the partition alignment shouldn't really matter.

First, try to measure the physical hdd speed so you can see if its a hard drive or bus problem. I use some old build of http://software.vgrin.host56.com/diskspeed32 but any similar app should work. You don't need to run it through, just see if you get a good speed at the beginning - anything above 50MB/s would be ok. If it's below that, then it's either a problem with the disk itself (bad blocks) or the interface (PIO mode...).

I've speed tested my drive before and in such tests I get around 100 MB/sec at most, I've tested for bad blocks using both chkdsk and several other utilities and there are no bad blocks on this drive to my knowledge so far...

This drive IS running in "legacy PATA" mode because Windoze would BSOD otherwise and I'm nervous about registry editing the driver, but that still never solved the problem as when I was running Linux for a moment in SATA mode, the drive still performed piss poor reading off of it.

I would just get a new drive, to be honest. Whenever a hard drive starts to run unusually slowly, that usually means it's in its dying throes.

I've got one of those, and they're really slow.

First, keep on mind that it is really a 5400 rpm hard drive with some quirks to enhace performance. WD says it should perform as good as a 7200 rpm drive, but it is a lie. It performs as good as a laptop hard drive. BTW, ]Toms Hardware tested your hard disk and measure about 100 mb/s, so your speed is normal. Having SATA AHCI enabled should make the drive go faster (because of NCQ and those things), but it won't be a great gain.

My advice: if you are worried about performance, stay out of those "green drives".

I have Green one too, but it is an EZRX and this apparently are much faster... Something has to be wrong with this HDD though,it just doesn't make sense for it to take 7 mins to boot up.

After all this discussion, I still don't get why the 7 min boot up time should be related to the HDD speed. It could as well be some driver time out.

I have read that those drives have a very short lifespan because of the power saving technology they use, Intellipark. If I understood correctly it parks the reading and writing heads after 8 seconds of inactivity, so in a normal use scenario it's constantly parking/unparking them, thus wearing out the drive.

There's an utility that lets you change that period of time to 300 seconds (it's called wd_idle or something like that), but I don't think it reverts the damage already done.

You don't mention what OS and motherboard/chipset.

It can be the IDE emulation vs native AHCI issue, but I do not recommend changing it after OS has been installed.

It can also be an issue between some old SATA controller and the new drive. The drive has 3Gbit/s interface, but maybe the motherboard has only 1.5Gbit/s interface? Or maybe the cable is for 1.5Gbit/s operation while both the drive and motherboard try to use 3Gbit/s?

elianda wrote:

After all this discussion, I still don't get why the 7 min boot up time should be related to the HDD speed. It could as well be some driver time out.

I know it's the HDD because as it's booting up the light strobes constantly and I hear alot of thrashing going on, hell just traversing the filesystem on a linux live CD takes forever half way through doing so. When I first installed the OS and got this drive it was really quick to boot and launch stuff on, I always regularly defragmented every two weeks, and overtime that apparently caused this drive to start working slower and slower to the point the bootup time has a grand total of 7 minutes as opposed to 1 and a half minutes I remember it taking a few years back...

fantasma wrote:

I have read that those drives have a very short lifespan because of the power saving technology they use, Intellipark. If I understood correctly it parks the reading and writing heads after 8 seconds of inactivity, so in a normal use scenario it's constantly parking/unparking them, thus wearing out the drive.

There's an utility that lets you change that period of time to 300 seconds (it's called wd_idle or something like that), but I don't think it reverts the damage already done.

Wow... I'm never getting another WD drive if this is what really happened to it, what the hell were they thinking with that decision?

Jepael wrote:

You don't mention what OS and motherboard/chipset.

It can be the IDE emulation vs native AHCI issue, but I do not recommend changing it after OS has been installed.

It can also be an issue between some old SATA controller and the new drive. The drive has 3Gbit/s interface, but maybe the motherboard has only 1.5Gbit/s interface? Or maybe the cable is for 1.5Gbit/s operation while both the drive and motherboard try to use 3Gbit/s?

It's a MSI 970A-G46 (MS-7693) 2.0

It sounds like it could be a case of horrendous fragmentation but frankly I've never seen that happen and you say you've been defragging anyway. Perhaps boot a Linux distribution like Parted Magic and run an extended SMART test. This distro ships with a handy drive health utility. This will take hours because it will scan the entire disk surface. Look at the SMART stats for anything ugly like lots of reallocated sectors.

You really should avoid using Green drives as a OS drive though because they are years behind the curve in performance. They have awful seek performance and pretty poor sequential performance that makes me not even want to use them for archival purposes...

Also, the WD10EADS (and other Greens of the time) will often automatically be put into SATA 1 mode by chipsets/drivers. There's some issue with their SATA 2 mode. This isn't a performance issue because the drives can't saturate 150MB/s in practice anyway.

FWIW, on Intellipark, I had a WD10EACS for years and it never died even after being used always-on in a NAS. Intellipark on that drive actually causes stuttering in games for example because the stupid drive parks the heads too often and causes transfer delays. WD10EADS is better behaved but I do have one of those as well and it is definitely still no speedy drive. There is a DOS utility to disable Intellipark if you so desire.

As soon as I'm able to install a working CD drive I'll boot that distro up, though I hope I can get away with using a flash stick or something as well...

DracoNihil wrote:

As soon as I'm able to install a working CD drive I'll boot that distro up, though I hope I can get away with using a flash stick or something as well...

Yup you can boot it on a flash stick. http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Cool, thank you. I'll post back when I have all the results in place.

Ermmm....try this :

Delete your user profile, after saving your documents or other important user-specific folders.

Create a new user profile and check it out.

Uninstall any unused or unnecessary programs too.

I did this for one of my laptops which was trashing the hard disk like mad, and it took something like what you said to finish booting up till the system became responsive to my actions. That system was running XP.