I think my new drive is too slow

Finally got my very own Seagate 7200.2 to replace my Fujitsu thing.

I dont know.. think the new drive is faster I figure I am going to load the drive up, stress it out, check for bad sectors through smart logs, and then stick it in my laptop.

 

I'd say ~60MB/sec is pretty good for a laptop drive. Faster than my best drive that is for sure.

 

Hehe

I really cant wait till I can load up Rescue and Recovery to image this new drive and get it going. Need to run all my tests first to make sure something on the new drive doesn't barf though.

 

Is this your first 7200 drive? Back when I got mine (Seagate 7200.1), I was not overly impressed by the difference between my 5400.2. After spending the last several months on a 5400 Samsung, the 7200.1 now feels pretty zippy. Go figure. lol

 

Yea first 7200. In my case its going from one of the slower 5400 to the faster 7200, so I should see a decent jump in speed. Still not sure what I want to do with the old 120gb drive. Might get the thinkpad 2nd bay adapter, or just stick it inside a enclosure of its own.

 

I have a 5400 Samsung in my laptop and a 5400 Seagate portable external. I could HD Tune them if you want. Only if you want though. Not doing it for kicks

 

Unless you can get both of them on a direct bus, the HDtune of the external drive is going to be pretty bad. USB pegs out around 25-27MB/s, unless yours is eSata, which then it isnt a problem.

 

Go figure. I have a fujitsu in my laptop In my defence, I never cared before and this is the first time I'm running HD Tune (had to download it as well ). Will update with an attachment. atm it looks rubbish ......

Edit one: running again. Can't be that can it?

Edit two: same results but HD became 2*c hotter....

There's a saying Diet. Be happy with your lot! As for my rubbish HD... grumble

 

Oh, and here is a shot of a 100gb 7k100 drive I took out of the X61 I am reviewing for its benchmark.

 

If you are cloning the new drive, you may want to leave the old one intact right now until the 7200.2 is put through the paces for awhile. It is a new revision, and someone on NBR already had one go wonky on him/her.

 

Of course. I am making a network image of the old one which I will keep intanct for a week or 2 before I re-purpose it.

EDIT: Note to self, remove the 9 gigs of movies and stuff off the drive before running a backup and making it take wayyy too long.

 

While we are grumbling about HDD performance, here's something interesting:

Yesterday I got a Samsung HM250JI (250GB 5400rpm). First I tested it on a spare SATA channel in my desktop computers. The results (_V1) for HD Tune and HDTach are attached. Everything looks fine with the transfer rate dropping steadily from around 60MB/s to 30MB/s.

Then I cloned my existing HDD onto the new one and retested in my notebook (Samsung X60 plus). The new results (_V2) are attached and show abysmal performance for the first ~50GB. This is approximately the primary partition. However, some of that space is not allocated or formatted, but that should not matter for these low level tests.

Any suggestions? I will retest tomorrow in my desktop.

John

 

Yikes, almost reminds me of the Seagate FreeAgent eSata drive I was using, which just blew in transfer speeds.

Have you ever checked the smart logs on the drive using something like smartctl?

 

Wooo, up and running finally. My god this thing is so fast. Windows load time is probably 1/3rd the time, photoshop loads in no time, and overall feels like a brand new computer. Haha, wont have to throw away this T60 after all

 

I still can't figure out why my 250GB HDD is slow over the first 50GB when installed in my notebook.

I checked it again in my desktop and it was fine, with results as before. Is it the Intel 945 chipset or the Samsung BIOS? Things work, but just don't work properly. I've got Active SMART monitoring the HDD, but so far it is reporting no problems. That the HDD works fine in one computer and not in another suggests the glitch is with the computer.

If / when my Q70 with the SR chipset shows up, I'll try it in that one.

John

 

Updated the BIOS lately? It almost looks like it's getting low power, or maybe a drive protection driver or something. Check the DMA settings of the drive in the laptop, too.

 

Is write caching enabled on that drive?

 

Yes write caching is enabled, the interface is set at UDMA5 and I updated the BIOS a few days back. Yesterday I installed the latest Intel inf update and then removed and redetected the HDD, in case this would fix it.

The baffling bit is why the data transfer rate is low for the first ~50GB and then jumps up to the right level.

John