Do maxtor drives have something that quiets them down, but can be shut off in order to improve performance?

[mikef208]

Q&A told me about something on Maxtor drives that quiets that down, but at the cost of performance. he said if you disable it the drive performs better. I looked on the Maxtor site, but could not find a referance to it. Please help if you know what I am talking about. I am trying to figure out why my Raid array is not benching what Samdra says it should be, it is about 1/3 what sandra say a raid 0 array with 7200RPM hard drives should be. I did recently find out I must have got my cables screwed up and was using a ATA33 or something, since I noticed my Primary Master was only in UDMA2 mode while my Secondary master was in UDMA5. I changed cables changed both to UDMA5, and rebenched, getting the same mark as before the cable switch, what else can I do to get my array up to what it should be. What should I set the Cluster/Stripe size to in the Raid BIOS? It defaults to 64k, so thats what it is at now, should I lower it?

 

[ElFenix]

yeah, maxtor does have program that can change acoustic settings for the drive. its a download on their site somewhere.

i wouldn't go by sandra at all. its one of the worst hard drive benching tools on the face of the planet. might as well just time how long it takes to copy a file.

EDIT: found it its acoustic management.

 

[Sugadaddy]

yeah, turn AM off. I got a new DM+60 drive and it made a good difference in seek time (tested with HD Tach), and it's still very quiet...

 

[mikef208]

So what is a good benchmark for a raid array, Hard drive tach? Also I can't seem to get an answer to this from all the people I asked. What should I set the cluster or stripe size or whatever it's called to. On my Abit KT7A raid it must default to 64K, I can set it lower, but not higher, what do you recommend?

 

[Quaggoth]

I recommend 64 k if you play games (Levels and games will load a bit faster), but if not, go for 32. Another thing to consider though, 2000 won't let you defrag a drive with larger than 4k clusters. Norton Utils will though.

 

[mikef208]

Really, I thought I had tried to defrag with 2K already, but maybe not. Oh well it doesn't matter, i have Norton System works. So you say leave it at 64K, I do game a little, what is the differance between a large cluster size and a small one?

 

[Sugadaddy]

Get HD Tach here...

And you got a PM...