Help with speed of wd20ears - 00mvwb0 on win xp

[laskos]

Hello!
I am building my new pc, dead silent offcourse and i have bought two 2tb wd20ears - 00mvwb0 , one for storage and the other for buckup.
I have issues with the speed of the drives.
Max read speed is 50mb/sec, (very slow i think...) verified through hdtune.
I have seen reviews on the the net with max read speed well above 120mb/sec.
Please advise me what exactly to do to get that performance on windows xp.
I know that is a very new drive with weird (for me at least) methods of configuration and i have not found something specific on the net...
Thanks you very much and i am waiting yours help.

[laskos]

Searching the web i have just found huge numbers of reported faults with wd 2tb ears drives!!!
Unbelievable failure rates!
Well first of all, after i will transfer my data in those two disk i am going to keep my original 1tb drive for security...
If any of the two drive dies for whatever reason, so wd dies for me too...
They arent going to take anotherone $ from me...

[Jasper]

You might want to look into aligning your partitions properly. The EARS is a 4 kB sectors drive, and WinXP does not by default partition properly for that. With 4 kB read/write, that would lead just about to a halving of the speed plus some overhead, as each 4 kB read or write would require 8 kB of read/write on the disk.

[mentawl]

Yeah, did you make sure to follow the WD instructions for Advanced Format HDDs? As Jasper says, it's very important for these drives to achieve their rated speeds on an old XP system.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/

[laskos]

Ok, a little late, but i have already instaled my drive, took backup on my second drive, easy instalation, very low noise, vibration and heat drive, really inaudible, 120+mb/sec performance, its good i think, everything seems perfect with my drives...