Hard Drive Performance

[hennessy1]

I have 2 1TB WD Black Edition Drives. When I run WD's diagnostic utility fora full erase they both take about the same amount of time.Only difference is about 9min in completion time. Would that be an indicator for a dying hard drive or is it pure paranoia? I've run the full media scan test and there is no bad sectors and only difference between those on that test is 3mins.

 

[Blain]

Try scanning with Active@ Hard Disk Monitor to double check.

 

[hennessy1]

My motherboard doesnt support smart will that software still work?

 

[dmh1167]

This may sound nuts , but it might be your trouble , WD erase doesn't really erase all the data on a drive just the boot partition , I think.

Like Blain I use Active@ Products if you use Blains link on that site you will find a program called Kill Disk if you use it it will wipe your drives by writing zeros to every sector on the drive.

I do this to get clean install for OS, If your not installing OS the disk tools in your OS or Active Hard Disk Monitor are just fine.

What MB do you have ? Do you have data on one drive and none on the other ? This can skew your results awww doesnt matter if you use kill disk, if you run disk tools in windows you are begging for trouble unless you are formating a new drive. I dont run anything more than defrag or Format in windows and its unwise to try anything that can affect your primary drive with your OS on it.

 

[Nothinman]

My motherboard doesnt support smart will that software still work?

The BIOS is irrelevant, it's the drives that are important. Sometimes the BIOS will check SMART briefly on bootup but even if it doesn't that won't matter if the drives support SMART.

 

[pjkenned]

Just a thought, what is the total time to erase? 9 min/ 2TB may not be that much and could just be standard variation. If you cloned my Raid 6 array with 13x 1.5TB hard drives, and had them both rebuild at the same time, 9 minutes would be negligible 🙂