Building a Graphics Workstation: Hard Drives Tests: Western Digital 640GB
June 17, 2008
For the purpose of data storage I chose Western Digital Caviar WD6400AAKS 640GB SATA hard drive. This 7200 rpm hard drive with 16 MB cache has quite positive reviews on internet. I tested them initially connected to Intel ICH9R SATA controller in RAID mode:
I got two of these drives, planning to setup RAID 0. One of the drives showed abnormal behaviour and SMART data showed problems (this was picked up by Intel® Matrix Storage Manager):
Subsequent error scan showed damaged sectors on this new drive:
After remapping the damaged sectors, the transfer rate showed significant drop due to remapped sectors:
Testing both drives in RAID 0 showed similar behaviour:
So the drive needed to be replaced. The replacement hard drive did not show abnormalities on initial testing and two of those were set up as RAID 0.