WD6400AAKS poor seek time problem and solution, WD tech support ftl

Problem and fix
So I got my 6400AAKS in today, after going back and forth between this and waiting who knows how long for a 150G Velociraptor I decided to get this, if I change my mind I have 90 days through Amex buyer protection anyway.

So, I hook up the drive and do an error scan, all is good. I then run HDTune and HDTach and get seek times of 15.5+ms !

Noo..clearly worse than the 12.8ms quoted in various reviews. I feel like I've been screwed again, like when Seagate changed the firmware on the 7200.10 500GB. Anyhow I knew that AAM affects seek times and that an OEM drive could be spec'd by the original intended OEM to have low noise but therefore poor seek times. Did some searching and poking around, tried WinAAM without success and then tried Hitachi's Feature Tool http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm burned the .iso, booted it and change the AAM to the highest numerical setting and bam!

Sweet sweet 12.2ms seek time. I may take some time to tone it down about, the seeks are really noticable now although I don't mind, but a few tenths of a miilisecond for much less noise might not be a bad tradeoff. I documented it in this thread as well: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?p=3057793#post3057793

This is definitely something people buying this popular drive need to check and know about, and shouldn't need to bother with RMAs if the seek times seem high.

WD level 2 tech support ftl

So I had called WD prior to doing this to find out if there were known firmware or WD utilities to fix this. The first level tech support is in India I believe and is just trained to do installation guidance. He quoted me the rated specs and then decided I should be transferred to level 2 when I mentioned that the 8.9ms average read doesn't take in to account rotational latency.

The level 2 tech wasn't very good though. He started out trying to bs me about 'seek times are average across the drive' and 'the benchmark can vary' (by 3ms? and it was the same becnhmark) and 'it depends upon what type of files are being worked with.' He even quoted the drive specs like 8.9ms average read access time, ugh. I started going in to firmwares, there aren't any alternatives for the drive and/or it's not flashable anyway, and then went in to AAM and he said it's possible that the OEM (he kept mentioning Dell and HP) spec'd it low and my only option would be to return it to the vendor. Of course he couldn't recommend a Hitachi tool even if he knew about it but he said he was positive there are is no way to change the AAM on a drive. He ended the call by recommending the Velociraptor ya, thanks buddy, don't you think someone who knows about HD firmwares and AAM would know about it already? Just felt a little peeved because it was like 'hey! buy our $300 flagship instead'...derdeder. The lesson? Google and user forums > level 2 tech support

bump, people buying these drives should look at this

I'm planning on picking up a couple of these in a month, bookmarked this

Great work MadMan... This needs to stay pretty close to the top. Almost begs to be part of a Sticky, like "Hardware/Firmware stuff" with a portion dedicated to either each brand, or range of models it impacts. This sort of info is often difficult to locate when you need it, and (while you can probably stuff your drive if you get it wrong) it is the sort of info that is always useful to those that need it.

wow, thanks.. definitely need to do this myself now


off topic, did you run any kind of tests on your new drives to determine if they are lemons? seems like a good thing to do, but what tests should be run?

You don't need anything special to figure out if an OEM drive has AAM tuned to be quiet but slow, just HDTach or HDTune. The seek times are what gives it away, if it's not at least sub-13ms you should consider using the Hitachi Tool. You don't even need to format the drive or anything, these types of low-level benchmarks don't depend upon any kind of file system at all.

sorry, no, i meant to generally test out a drive when you get it. not necessarily performance tests, but reliability tests. i read about it somewhere, but can't remember what they said.


edit - I found it here

After witnessing SATA/ATA drive failures first hand, I now do something along the lines of what Nexsan does. I put brand new drives through a DOD wipe, a week straight of SDStress, then a final DOD wipe. I find the same failure rates as I mentioned previously (failure rate 2/32 1wk of stress).

Click to expand...

very nice work. i've been thinking about getting one of these drives.

leftheaded said:

sorry, no, i meant to generally test out a drive when you get it. not necessarily performance tests, but reliability tests. i read about it somewhere, but can't remember what they said.


edit - I found it here

Click to expand...

I guess you could stress test but given the warranty lengths on drives I'd expect a failure to be within the warranty. The advantage of what you quote is that you could RMA through the vendor.

I usually scan with HDTune Error Scan.

I just purchased 2 of these drives to do a Matrix setup. If I am reading this correctly, I should put the drives in my system and before creating any arrays check them with a benchmark utiliy and use the Hitachi tool if needed. Right?

What is AAM?

Automatic Acoustic Management

Hmm, I tried the utility and it doesn't recognize any of my drives. 2 are attached to the motherboard and 5 are attached to a raid card. Probably because they are all part of different raid arrays, but I don't want to break the array .

Yea the drives have to be hooked up in regular IDE mode not AHCI or RAID. Now a few times when I had RAID arrays on an ICH9R the BIOS reset and the OS simply wouldn't boot but once I'd reset the ports to RAID it was fine, and once I had to change back to IDE mode to be able to boot off another bootable CD. So in those cases I never had a problem with changing to IDE mode then back the arrays were fine but if you do try that and it breaks don't blame me

im not sure i see the problem..? 15ms is about the norm for drives like that isnt it? heck my 320 perp gets 13ms. my wd2500ks gets into the 15s as well.

No, 15ms is high for these new WD 640GB drives.

GJ on the find MadMan.

MadMan007 said:

Yea the drives have to be hooked up in regular IDE mode not AHCI or RAID. Now a few times when I had RAID arrays on an ICH9R the BIOS reset and the OS simply wouldn't boot but once I'd reset the ports to RAID it was fine, and once I had to change back to IDE mode to be able to boot off another bootable CD. So in those cases I never had a problem with changing to IDE mode then back the arrays were fine but if you do try that and it breaks don't blame me

Click to expand...

Well my OS array is imaged regularly, so I can test on that, but all my important stuff is on the other array which may or may not go so well

What about overall HDD transfer speeds? Is this only supposed to really effect seek times?

This will have no impact on STR or moving large files, seek time affects working with small files in general which means specific applications or games will benefit and overall lower seek time makes a system seem more 'snappy.'

your point / problem if you could call it that, was shown over at spcr a week ago... 12.4 with aam disabled.... 16.3 w/ it enabled.... no surprises

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article847-page3.html

thats what happens with AAM, is stops the head movement over a longer distance to cut down on seek noise essientally making the head move slower and thus increasing seek times.

That's nice but I posted this on 6-12 both here and at xtremesystems, theirs is dated 6-18. Maybe they read it here or there and wrote it up? I did come up with it all on my own too and had to try a few different programs to get it right.

MadMan007 said:

That's nice but I posted this on 6-12 both here and at xtremesystems, theirs is dated 6-18. Maybe they read it here or there and wrote it up? I did come up with it all on my own too and had to try a few different programs to get it right.

Click to expand...

oh crap im sorry i didnt note the original posts's date i hadnt seen this thread before now and i am always in the storage section so i assumed it was new ... doh


but ya AAM is nice, i have it enabled on my servers main OS hd (i have to hide the server in a corner so dad dont see it cus its on 24/7) and its super quiet, seek times do increase a lil tho... honestly i have never seen seek times go up by 4ms cus of AAM... tells me that the difference between enabled and disabled must be quite a bit!