New A drive with Instantcake stutterting

So, after quite a weekend ordeal of not being able to copy over a failing A drive and save a B drive, I just instantcaked a 120GB WD drive I had. The IS went I think fine, but after C&D and setup, the drive likes to stutter when FF on 2 or more. I FF on 2 clicks and it runs a minute, pauses a few seconds runs another minute, pauses 2 seconds, etc.

I used a new ultra IDE cable, since I killed the previous one. It is now only a ONE drive tivo, so there is no data issue. What could it be, the drive I put in seemed fine, checked out fine. It IS a western digital drive, I like the Maxtors and it makes a BIT of noise.

But, are there STUTTERING drives?