So when I built my new desktop I decided to harvest an unused former primary drive from before I switched to an SSD (10k RPM 300GB WD Raptor from 2009), and set it up as a secondary drive to host some music and some games that I don't want on my SSD but I figure would benefit from being on a faster disk.
I can read and write from the drive fine, but I notice frequent stuttering and lag originating from this drive. Particularly noticeable when playing music stored on the drive (tracks skip for 3-5 seconds) or playing a game that's installed on the drive (hangtime/stutter lag when loading files).
However no SMART errors detected, no bad sectors on ChkDsk. I am sure the drive is the issue because I cloned it onto another drive (a 250GB WD Caviar Black) and put it into the same SATA slot and the clone plays the games and music fine without these issues. The same music copied out of this drive onto my SSD and onto my media storage drive also plays back fine without an issue.
I don't really need the drive but I would like to figure out what exactly the problem with it is. Because it's not RMA eligible, WD just said "If diagnostics and SMART say the drive is fine we dunno. Back up ur data."