Difference between revisions of "Performance of the Western Digital WD1000FYPS terabyte drive"

I have a Linux box which I use for MythTV, SqueezeCenter, as a file server etc. The primary drive is a WD5000AAKS and performs quite well, so I use a large partition on it for the MythTV recordings. Later I added this WD1000FYPS for longer-term file storage, and I've always been dissatisfied with the performance. It's strange, because hdparm reports good results:

[neutron][01:34:48 PM] hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 1974 MB in 2.00 seconds = 986.64 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 198 MB in 3.01 seconds = 65.70 MB/sec

[neutron][01:49:00 PM] hdparm -tT /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 2160 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1080.53 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 224 MB in 3.02 seconds = 74.22 MB/sec

(it should be even faster than the 500 gig drive) but it seems like in normal usage, the seek time is really bad or something. The drive can go for several minutes at a time making rhythmic seek noises, much louder than the other one. While it is doing this, any files stored on that drive are not very accessible - even doing "ls" can take a very long time, as much as half a minute or so. I have not had any data loss though. I don't know what to blame the performance on, but I would bet that if I get a different model of terabyte drive and transfer everything to it, I will see a huge difference in performance. I just wondered if there are some known problems along these lines - something caused by the RAID optimization, or the "green" aspects or something that can be corrected with a firmware update, or maybe it's an actual defect (since I'm reading a lot of reviews about problems with this one, people losing all their data after a day, or a month). If I can still trust this drive not to lose data, maybe I just have to put it in a box and use it for an external backup drive, because it can transfer data reasonably fast as long as there's not too much seeking involved.