WD Caviar Black 1TB Stuttering Problem

Are there other programs (such as virus scanners, for example) accessing the drive? Any concurrent access by multiple programs is likely to cause a lot of seeks which can drastically lower performance.

I can only suggest some additional things to consider,
but without any "guarantees", OK?

In case you didn't know this, Intel recommends that
the BIOS setting for the main SATA ports be configured
as RAID even if you plan to start with JBOD (Just a Bunch
Of Disks).

At Newegg, however, I see that the specs for your
motherboard show the ICH10 I/O controller hub,
which is not the same as ICH10R (RAID edition):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131329


You should double-check to make sure that you
are running the latest Intel chipset drivers.

Quite often, users of ASUS motherboards forget
to install the Chipset Drivers from the Support CD,
and this could explain your problem. If you have
not done so, then DO SO IMMEDIATELY!


Also, there may be an updated version of those
Chipset Drivers in the Download section of the
ASUS website for that motherboard:

http://www.asus.com/Product.aspx?P_ID=YYermRswb7n46yAX


Also, after confirming that you have installed the
Chipset Drivers from the Support CD, if you still
experience the same stuttering, I would strongly
suggest that you contact Western Digital directly.



Hope this helps


MRFS

p.s. One more thing: that HDD defaults to SATA/3G (300 MB/second),
and the cache is 32MB:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/pro [...] riveid=488


The low HDTune "Burst Rate" of only 137.5 MB/second makes me suspect
that your HDD's interface is running at only 150MB/second
(also known as "SATA-I" or Gen 1):

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/4 [...] hdtune.jpg


This is another reason to double-check the Chipset Driver version
you are running currently.

Along these same lines, it wouldn't hurt also to double-check
the HDD's jumper default: according to WD's Jumper Specs,
the lack of any jumpers defaults to 300MB/second. So,
check to see if there is a jumper on pins 5 and 6:

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/ [...] ttings.pdf
(see Figure 2: SATA Hard Drive Jumper Settings)


MRFS