Hello,
I bought two Ironwolf Pro 16TB CMR hard drives. I ran badblocks on them and peculiarly I noticed that 1 drive inched ahead slowly over time and ended up finishing about 4-5 hours earlier than the other one. The test lasted about 4 days overall.
Afterwards, I ran some CrystalDiskMark and sure enough there is ~20 MB/s speed difference. I swapped the ports and cables the drives were connected to and still no change. Not sure what's going on here. Is the faster drive perhaps a higher capacity binned drive or something? I was going to use these in a RAID1 setup so not sure how important it is to match the speeds. And would there be any longevity differences between the two if one is indeed binned (extra read head/platter?). I have about 20 days left on the return window, wondering if I should RMA the lower speed drive for a replacement. Both drives passed the badblocks test with 0 errors.
CrystalDiskMark:
https://preview.redd.it/3nl71li6ak7d1.png?width=1156&format=png&auto=webp&s=b6256725d459ef7a2d939742b9f2adf0e6a2a537
Edit: Drive model number is ST16000NT001-3LV101. Both have the same firmware version and manufacture dates.
