Need help with WD Caviar Green HDD installation

Hi all,

I have recently bought a new WD20EARS Caviar Green 2 TB Harddrive. I already have a Vantec Nextar Case with eSata & USB interface. I am wanting to use the new harddrive in my existing case with eSata. The issue that I am having is that my harddrive is performing extremely slow on eSata. Previously I had a Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm drive installed in the same case. Compare to the read/write speed of my old drive I don’t even have half the read/write speed on my new drive. Not only that, but whenever I am writing big files on the drive, it pauses in between the transfer for a while & then continues again! For example, if I want to copy a 3 GB file from my internal drive to the External drive, first 800-900 MBs would transfer at decent speeds which you can expect from eSata connection, but then suddenly the transfer progress bar would not move anywhere for another minute or two & then it would start progressing again.

So far, I have checked the Jumper settings for the new drice & according to WD Support site, I do not need any jumper for the drive & it should be left as is. I know for sure that all of the other components are working in order because I have had this External Case + eSATA Cable + Express Card for eSata connection to my MBP for more than a year now & I have tested it all with my old drive & it all work excellent. Can someone please guide me as to what am I missing, because of which, I am having slow speed of transfer and PAUSES in the middle of transfer?

Thanks.

I would open up disc utility and run a verify and repair disk on it first. The WD green drives are not as fast as their black drives, nor probably many other drives. They're designed with energy conservation in mind and work a little differently.

Having said that, I'm using them in my Win Home Server box and I did have one of them fail less than a month old. WD had a replacement at my door in 2 days after filing the request online. It can be a little harder to tell if the drive is failing or something else is happening when being used as a storage drive vs a system drive.

bobtomay said:

I would open up disc utility and run a verify and repair disk on it first. The WD green drives are not as fast as their black drives, nor probably many other drives. They're designed with energy conservation in mind and work a little differently.

Having said that, I'm using them in my Win Home Server box and I did have one of them fail less than a month old. WD had a replacement at my door in 2 days after filing the request online. It can be a little harder to tell if the drive is failing or something else is happening when being used as a storage drive vs a system drive.

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Hey thanks for the quick response. I understand that WD drive is not designed for performance. But I still don’t understand the “PAUSES” that I am having in between of the transfers!

That I'm not sure about either. As fast as WD responded to my request for an exchange though, you may want to visit their site and shoot off an email to their support and see what they say. It could be the beginning of a failing drive.