Hard Drive Problems

[JohnPaul]

I have two Maxtor 80Gb Diamondmax 9s with 8mb cache. My main drive seemed to be a bit sluggish at times lately, so I decided to test it with the speed test that comes with Nvidia's ATA controller on the NF2.

Anyhow, everything seemed normal except for the Sustained Speed Test, which was very low(0.8). My other 80 gig, which is exactly the same drive got around 45 on the SST. I also ran HD Tach with the same type of results. Why is my HD reading so slowly? Is it dying? Aside of its slowness, it seems to run fine. No grinding or anything like that. Is it a setting or possibly something such as another drive conflicting with it.

Damn Maxtor for changing their warrenty policies on retail drives within a month of me buying these drives. If this drive is crapping out, it is six months out of their one year warrenty.

 

[bandana163]

Is the drive fragmented?
Severe fragmentation can cause extreme slowdowns (even 2-3MB/s or slower speeds).

 

[JohnPaul]

No, it is not fragmented, but to make sure, I just ran a defrag, and retested. Same results sadly. I put my windows on my other drive, and I can tell it is definitely faster. The thing is, the drive seems to work fine besides this.

 

[VirtualLarry]

HDTach tests at the block-device level, which is below the filesystem level, so it is not affected by fragmented filesystems in any way.
It's possible that if the HD encountered errors in the past, that Windows' might have cranked the IDE interface speeds down a bit, possibly to PIO mode. Re-installing your IDE controller drivers usually resets that info and allows devices to run at full speed again. Another thing to check would be the SMART data from that drive, to see if it has encountered any errors or has pending- or remapped sectors. I use a program called DTemp/DrvTemp, written by a russian fellow. It hasn't been updated in a while but it's small and it works.