WD 360 (Raptor) Sata Drive

[Prok]

I recently set up a new system with an MSI Neo2 FisR board, pentium 2.6 and a Western Digital SATA drive (36gb 10k rpm - "Raptor"). I'm curious if anyone else out there has had experience with this drive in relation to noise and benchmarks. In the first week of use it had almost no noise - now whenever I load up an application I hear a lot of "crunching". I've benchmarked it (SiSoft Sandra 2004) and have had varying results between 15,000 and 25,000 (drive index). The most recent was at 18,277 kb/s and the details are below:
Buffered read: 97 mb/s
Sequential read: 23 mb/s
Random read: 8 mb/s
Buffered write: 22 mb/s
Sequential write: 29 mb/s
Random write: 13 mb/s
Average access time: 5 ms

Does anyone know if these numbers (and noise) stack up to what they should for this kind of drive?
Any advice or knowledge would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.

 

[scottkli]

I have 2 of these in SATA Raid on my IC7-G boards Silicon Image chip. With my Sonata case I dont hear much internal sound out of these drives. My older drives 30gb WD 7200 rpm drives made crunchy sounds but I had those a few years so I dont know. If your really worried send it back, use that 5 year warranty.

 

[soulprovider]

Have you defragged the drive? - your write speeds seem pretty low as well as the sequential read. The noise you're hearing isa probably the drive having to access a lot of fragmented data.

<b>Vorsprung durch Dontwerk</b>.....<i>as they say at VIA</i>

 

[WingDing]

I only hear an occasional soft whirring noise, but nothing that could be described as crunching.

Barton 2500+, 512MB Corsair Platinum XMS 3200 CL2, Radeon 9700, WD Raptor 10,000 rpm S-ATA HDD, Asus A7V600, Enermax 460W SilentPlus PSU.