We bought some new PCs in my company with the new iCore 7 and 8GB memory and the following hard disk: WESTERN DIGITAL WD8000AARS 800GB CAVIAR GREEN SATA2
The problem we have is that after installing windows XP64 SP2 the write speed of the hard disk is extremely low!.
The windows system monitor shows that the Average Disk queue length is always at 100% and a winzip extract of 350mb takes about 8min.
Is there any idea on where to start looking for the cause of that?
Thanks
Best Answer
That drive isn't really compatible with Windows XP as it uses a larger 4K sector size - it should explain the performance problems.
There's a special alignment tool from WD for Advanced Format drives you need to use or set the correct jumper if it's only going to host one partition.
matrice of OS and how to get them to work http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/images/WD-Align_chart_r2.jpg
It's really time to upgrade from Windows XP as this kind of workaround from drive makers probably won't be provided in the future.