transfer speeds on new hard drive

I don't know if this should make a difference but I had both hard drives hooked up on the last two connections coming from the PSU.

Today, I moved it up one connection so it is not on the last one. Now my transfer speeds are a little better. It starts out around 120mb's for a couple seconds then starts slowly going down. It seems to be staying around 25mb's. I know it is not as fast as it should be but it is a little better.

Maybe it has to do with which connector it is connected to coming from the PSU.

EDIT: I just unplugged the dvd drive which is on the same cable as the hard drives and it got even better. It started around 120mb's for about 5 or 6 seconds, then started going down less than 1mb at a time and before I canceled it, it only got down to 50mb's but was still slowly going down. Does this mean that the cable from the PSU could be bad? I might try switching them out.

I just hooked one up as a external drive and the speeds stayed around 34mb's. I don't know why the speeds will not stay constant when they are hooked up as internals.
 
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I don't know what is going on. Now more problems:mad: While Windows was up and running, the second 500gb drive just disappeared. So I decided to restart and it took forever, stayed at the bios screen for several seconds, then stayed at the Windows logo screen for several minutes. Didn't think it was ever going to boot up. Both drives show up in the bios.

It finally booted up and the second drive is still not showing. I might try and do an RMA through Newegg. Anybody know how long an RMA normally takes?

Before ^this happened, the transfer speeds were a quite a bit better, around 50 to 60mb's.

I am still not convinced that the hard drives are the problem. I am still trying to get a different motherboard installed and see if that helps.

EDIT: I went to disk management and it says I must initialize the second drive. Does that mean I have to format it? Why is it doing this to me?

I tried to initialize the drive and it said it could not be performed because of a I/O device error. I unhooked the dvd drive and now the drive shows up. What in the world is going on? Aargh, I have gone completely mad.
 
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I wished I would have saw your post earlier. I bought 2 of the same drives a few months ago and one was doing the same thing your is. It's bad, return it to newegg for a replacement. I tried setting up a raid 0 and it took over an hour to install XP, when it only should have taken like 30 minutes or less. It too also kept disappearing from bios. Your ownly solution is to return it. Sorry to be bearer of bad news.

Edit. The reason why you only see logical drives instead of physical drives is because you are running windows 7 and you need to run WD's diagnostic program as administrator. So right click on the icon and click on run as administrator and that will change it from logical drive to physical drive.
 
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Thanks johnb35, I just ran WD diagnostic tool as admin and it showed physical drives. I ran the extended test and it said cable test: write sector error on both drives.

So it looks like I am going to return these to newegg. I was afraid of this. Any idea how long the turnaround is? What do I need to do to the hard drives before I send them back to make sure they can't recover any information on it? Do I just format them with a program like gparted? Can I use the WD Diagnostic tool to format using the write zeros option?
 
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I believe using the program called Killdisk will do it for you. But I think writing zero's to the drive will work as well.
 
What about the drive that has Windows on it, can I use the WD tool to format that one too? Or do I have to use a program like gparted on a bootable cd?
 
Yeah, you can. You'll just have to download the dos version and burn the image to cd and boot to the cd to do it since you can't format windows drive while inside windows.
 
Which would be the better option, gparted live or the WD tool? I already have gparted on a cd. Would the WD tool be better since it writes zeros to the drive?

EDIT: Now the second drive is not showing up in the bios or anywhere else. I am guessing there is no way to format it if it is not recognized. Should I be worried about newegg recovering any information of the drive?

I installed the second drive as an external drive and it shows up. But I still can't use the WD tool to format the drive, gives an error. I guess I will just use Windows option to format.
 
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I have just received my replacement hard drives from Newegg and something is still not right.

I have 1 new drive with Windows installed on it and my old 250gb drive hooked up as internal drives. The new hard drive is at 63 degrees right now, and has got up to 68 degrees celsius. The old 500gb drive and the 250gb drive idles around mid 20's. Should I be worried about this? Should I continue to use this drive? I am having the worst luck here lately. If I have to RMA these again, I am going to be mad.

I have not hooked the second 500gb drive up yet. I will update this later.

EDIT: I just installed the second 500gb drive and it shows a temp of 20 degrees celsius. The thing is I felt the drive that is showing 60+ degrees with the pc turned off and it did not feel that warm at all. I also put my hand behind the drive while it was running and the air was cold, not warm at all. Could it possibly be a false reading? Do you think I should remove Windows from this drive and install it on the other drive just to be safe?

EDIT2: I tried to transfer some files to the second 500gb drive and it is doing the same thing. The speeds starts out really high and then starts dropping like a rock just like before. Now I am almost certain that there is something else wrong. Surely I do not have another bad drive. What are the chances of getting bad drives 2 times in a row?

EDIT3: Another thing that doesn't make sense. When I had one of the 500gb drives and the 250gb installed as internals, the transfer speeds was not that bad. I transferred some files from the 250gb to the 500gb drive and it stayed around 47mb's, still should be higher than that but better than before. But transfer speeds suck when transferring between the 2 new drives.

EDIT4: It seems that the temp was just a fluke. It is now showing 22 degrees. But now other problems. If I have more than one drive including the dvd drive hooked up, it takes forever to boot up. I have tried switching the cables and no luck. Now this has me thinking it is the motherboard, which is what I thought all along. I am probably going to take it to a shop and have them install a different motherboard just to confirm it.
 
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Now I am totally confused. If I have all three drives hooked up, 2 HDD's and 1 dvd drive, it boots up just fine. But if I unhook 1 HDD, it does not want to boot. Sometimes it wants to check the disk for consistency, other times I get a blue screen, could not read it since it restarted right away.

I have tried unhooking every drive except the Windows drive and still the same thing happens. As soon as I hook all three drives up, it works just fine. I was wanting to use 1 HDD as an external drive for backup. Now I can't do that until I get this figured out. I was thinking bad motherboard ports but now I just don't know. I am going to take it to a shop and have them test out a different motherboard.

I also tried a different SATA cable with one drive hooked up and still the same thing.

The transfer speeds are still a little slow. Last time I transferred some files, the speed stayed around 60mb's which is better but still slower than what it should be.

Also, I still can not past the WD Diagnostic tool with either drive. Surely the drives are not the problem. What are the chances of getting 4 bad hard drives? I would think that is pretty rare.
 
Here is an update. I RMA'd my motherboard through Gigabyte and they said it had a corrupted bios which they fixed and they are sending the same one back. I was hoping to get a replacement but that can't be changed now.

Anyways, would a corrupted bios cause all the problems I have been having including the nvlddmkm error? Is there a way to tell if any motherboard has a corrupted bios?

I get the motherboard back this Thursday. I hope all my problems are solved. If not I am going to be mad. I will let you know what I find out.

EDIT: Well, I got the motherboard installed and Windows is up and running and I am still having the same problems. I don't know what to do now. Besides the corrupted BIOS, they said there was nothing else wrong with the board. I don't know if I should still try to get a replacement or not. It took over 2 weeks to do an RMA. I thought about buying a different one but I don't know.

I was almost certain it was hardware but I had the video card RMA'd, both hard drives RMA'd, bought a new PSU, had the motherboard checked out by Gigabyte. The only thing I haven't replaced is the memory and the cpu. The memory tested out fine and I can't see it being the cpu.

Now I am starting to think I got a bad copy of Windows. Could a bad copy of Windows cause problems like these? I have the retail version of Windows so I may try to install the 32 bit version and see what happens.
 
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