Location: Other, Everywhere
Industry: Technology
Recently bought a new SATAII WD 500gb drive (WD5000AAKS) from a large Canadian reseller. I ran HD Tune to check out the drive when I got it, and found that while throughput was very good, access time was absurdly poor (19ms). Most people get 13.x ms with these drives. So I sent an email off the WD to ask what might be going wrong, and after a week, still haven't received a reply.
I did ask around in various forums if anyone else has experienced this, and got a bunch of replies from people who've bought this drive in the past couple weeks and found the same thing. Some of us are speculating that WD has done some cost cutting measure on the drives causing the poor access times. One person did manage to get a WD tech on the phone, and they pretty much say they don't discuss "performance issues" but offered to RMA the drives for refurbs!
So, if you're looking for a high performance drive, don't go for any WD drives that have been on the market long enough to avoid any new reviews. I suspect they, like many other computer hardware manufacturers, are putting out a decent product long enough to get good reviews on hardware sites, then cost cutting shortly after.
What especially ticks me off is they're lack of response after a week, when they say they'll respond in one day, three days at the most. They're hiding something.
Western Digital sucks, Maxtor is mediocre, Seagate are your best bet but stay away from the 7200.11's (more specifically, the 500GB drives, don't know about other sizes). The occasional manufacturing problem occurs but WD's have a REALLY bad reputation, had one die in a friends machine, was lucky enough to get stuff off before it went totally boobs up.
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