Old WD1600JS reads at full speed, but writes at 500 kB/s

[unmei220]

Nice to meet you all, I'm new to the forums.
I've learned a lot by reading the threads, and now I have some doubts with an old WD1600JS HDD, which I'm trying to clarify.

The disk has already been cloned 100%, and every sector has been read at full speed (speeds between 60 MB/s at the start and ending at about 35 MB/s, something normal with these models), so data is not important in this case. I don't need the disk for anything now, just trying to find out if I can get it back to a decent operating state, and for the fun of it.
I wanna point out that I don't have any specialized hardware/tools for HDD manipulation, just WDR demo, Sediv, and other free tools such as MHDD, HDAT2, etc.

Now, the problem:
The disk writes every sector at ~500 kB/s. It reads the full surface perfectly and at full speed, but it can't write at any decent speed.
Does anyone have any idea of what problem/problems can cause this issue?

I've already fixed a lot of slow WD drives using the "slow fix" posted here in the forums, but this is not a ROYL drive (it's a Hawk I think), so I don't know if a similar procedure exist for this type of drives, couldn't find anything on the forums for non-ROYL family models.

As I had nothing to lose, I started playing with the drive (my fault), and don't know why I did it, but I cleared SMART using WDR, so I can't provide a full report on that as all values has been reset to 0.
All that I remember previous to doing that was that everything was OK (values at 0 for critical ones) except for "Current pending sector count" which was at 8.

Thanks for any insight or reply.

[jermy]

In short: bin it

[unmei220]

Like I said in the first post, I just wanted to know the underlying cause that makes the disk to behave like that when writing...

As I said, data is not an issue here, so I can just throw it away, but if possible, I would like to learn something from it before sending it to the bin.

So, any other ideas about what could be the problem with it?
Remember, I would like to know if possible what makes the disk to behave like that.

[unmei220]

Thanks for the reply!

But, how do I clear RE-LO using WDR, SeDiv or WDMarvel? (I only have free/demo versions of those)

[guru]

In most cases you will kill the head if you self scan a HDD with a weak write element

[fzabkar]

I would perform a secure erase and time it. This will eliminate the SATA interface as a possible bottleneck. That is, there is no data transfer via SATA during this process.

[unmei220]

Just want to know before doing anything...
Isn't the "slow fix" only intended for ROYL drives? I think I've read somewhere in the forums that non-ROYL drives are not affected by the slow issue.
Remember that this drive is not a ROYL drive, it's a Hawk model.

[unmei220]

Well... I went ahead and did it anyway...

mod32patch returned the following, so I guess it didn't even work?

Code:

root@partedmagic:/media/sdc/mod32patch-1.0# mod32patch -r /dev/sda
modnum : 32
Number of sectors in Mod 32h : 0x0
mod32sec : 0
mod32len : 0
modnum : 32
MOD32 is 0

root@partedmagic:/media/sdc/mod32patch-1.0# mod32patch -w /dev/sda
file size : 0
modnum : 32
This is not a valid Western Digital Mod 32 file
root@partedmagic:/media/sdc/mod32patch-1.0#

Don't know if it works on non-ROYL drives.
Both "mod32ori.bin" and "mod32new.bin" filesize was 0 bytes.