WD4000KS

Carl21

Carl21

Carl21

Associate
Joined
16 Oct 2005
Posts
28
Hey,

My WD SATA II 16mb Cache WD 4000 KS came yesterday, I did a speed test from Device Manager, and below are the results, are they normal for this type of drive?

• The Current transfer speed mode is Serial ATA Generation 2-3G
• Write Cacheing is enables

Test results (in million of bytes per second)

• Theroretical Limit - 300.0
• Burst Speed - 111.8
• Sustained Speed - 62.8



Also, I only just noticed this model doesn't have NCQ (shows how much I looked into my buy! :( ) Is this a big drawback?

And lastly, with WD, there is a tool you can download from the website called Data LifeGuard, which you can use to copy data from a folder on one HDD to another folder on a seperate HDD - I'm just wondering, is there a difference between using this tool and just normal windows copy and pasteing (because i did a mixture of both)

Thanks in advance.


Carl
 
I'm a bit of a n00b when it comes to hard drives, but I think those results are good.

And NCQ is pretty pointless (for desktop users anyway). In the case of most drives, it harms performance.
 
I have a WD 3200KS and I just ran HD Tach. Says I got a burst speed of 218.4 MB/s :confused:

Average read of 57.1 MB/s

There's pretty much nothing on the drive at the moment, I only got it yesterday.
 
Heres my results:

untitled.JPG


Why is mine so low then?

My motherboard tells me it can support 3Gb/sec, which is around 300MB, no?
 
Carl21 said:
Hey,

My WD SATA II 16mb Cache WD 4000 KS came yesterday,...{snip}

Carl
Click to expand...

Hi Carl,

Sorry for the thread hijack but how are you finding the noise levels on the WD? I've got a pair of old WD's in my PC-7+, but the motors and bearings are very noisey, giving out a constant whine. I'm looking to replace them both with one 4000 KS but can't find a review of it online. I'm interested in both the idle and seek noise if you can help...?

Many thanks,

Simon.
 
1. You can quite safely ignore the burst speed - it's usually quite a meaningless statistic. Only when it's something ridiculously low like 30MB/s do you actually need to worry.

2. Your transfer graph looks a little odd - most of the "normal" graphs I've seen are a smoothly decaying (i.e. fastest at the beginning, then slowing down gradually to the lowest at the end) curve whereas yours seems to fly all over the place.

For your reference, mine:

hdtach.jpg

Notice the general trend downwards (the blips are due to the HD being accessed by another program) - as far as I know, a fully working healthy HD should have a similar transfer graph shape. Perhaps it depends on the controller, or are you running many other programs in the background?
 
I plugged both the Molex 4 pin power connector and the S-ATA Power connenter in at the same time. (only just realised my mistake by looking it up) there was no warning or anything about this, as far as i know its only WD who supply both power ports?

Think ive buggered it up?

£160 down the drain :|
 
S_D said:
Hi Carl,

Sorry for the thread hijack but how are you finding the noise levels on the WD? I've got a pair of old WD's in my PC-7+, but the motors and bearings are very noisey, giving out a constant whine. I'm looking to replace them both with one 4000 KS but can't find a review of it online. I'm interested in both the idle and seek noise if you can help...?

Many thanks,

Simon.
Click to expand...

Can't hear it at all when its Idle, and when its seeking you can hardly hear a thing. Thats in the two days that ive had it.
 
Carl21 said:
I plugged both the Molex 4 pin power connector and the S-ATA Power connenter in at the same time. (only just realised my mistake by looking it up) there was no warning or anything about this, as far as i know its only WD who supply both power ports?

Think ive buggered it up?

£160 down the drain :|
Click to expand...
Isn't there a warning on the surface label to not plug in both power ports at the same time? Did you think it would go faster with both power ports? :D Anyhow, have you unplugged one of them now? Try running the HDTach again.

When and if it does get buggered up, you can probably RMA it without problems... but unless the diag utility shows up errors right now, you will have to wait until the HD is actually buggered to be able to RMA it.
 
Carl21 said:
I plugged both the Molex 4 pin power connector and the S-ATA Power connenter in at the same time. (only just realised my mistake by looking it up) there was no warning or anything about this, as far as i know its only WD who supply both power ports?

Think ive buggered it up?

£160 down the drain :|
Click to expand...

Nah it will probably still be fine... I accidently ran my Raptor for around 2 weeks with both power connectors plugged in. Haven't had any ill effects and that was over 6 months ago! :)
 
jhmaeng said:
Isn't there a warning on the surface label to not plug in both power ports at the same time? Did you think it would go faster with both power ports? :D Anyhow, have you unplugged one of them now? Try running the HDTach again.

When and if it does get buggered up, you can probably RMA it without problems... but unless the diag utility shows up errors right now, you will have to wait until the HD is actually buggered to be able to RMA it.
Click to expand...

With that last screenshot, its unplugged - so you can see its still running very strange. The Diag utility shows no problems. I don't know what to do :(

And your right about it saying NOT to plug both in. :(
 
Last edited:
Is the drive your Windows drive or is it a storage drive? Have you got many other programs running in the background that could be accessing/writing to the drive and causing the graph to look like that?

Your actual results are very similar to my WD 250gb drive. I get 170MB Burst, 52.9MB/s sustained transfer, 13.2ms random access and 2% CPU utilisation.
 
Street said:
Is the drive your Windows drive or is it a storage drive? Have you got many other programs running in the background that could be accessing/writing to the drive and causing the graph to look like that?

Your actual results are very similar to my WD 250gb drive. I get 170MB Burst, 52.9MB/s sustained transfer, 13.2ms random access and 2% CPU utilisation.
Click to expand...


Its Windows drive, no programs running, new install of Windows.

Could my graph look so different because its quite high capacity? (400gb)
 
It could be... I personally don't think theres anything wrong with it. All your results are very similar to mine. You could try running WD's diagnostic program on it. I've forgotten what its called but its on their site somewhere. That will tell you for deffinate it its faulty or not:)
 
Ok it's prob just me, I think whats making me paranoid is that in the specs it supports a Interface transfer rate (Serial ATA) of 300 MB/s (Max).

I can't see that anywhere in the test results.


Also, I ran what you said "Data LifeGuard Tools" it all looks fine, except it says "N/A" for "Firmware Revision"
 
Heres a speed test from a Maxtor SATA drive 1.5G

Maxtor.JPG


And this being my new WD 3G drive

WD4000KS.JPG



The old SATA has a faster burst speed! and hardly no difference in Sustained speed.
 
Burst speed is pretty much irrelevant. And the sustained transfer of those drives is pretty much as fast as you're going to get with 7k RPM drives. To get faster, you need 10k Raptors or SCSI drives.

The 3GB/s is only the theoretical max speed of the interface, SATA2 will have added features over SATA1 as well:)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom