Issue with Velociraptor?

[jmsabatini]

I'm wondering if I have an issue that warrants returning the "new" Velociraptor drive I just purchased. I put "new" in quotes because I noticed that the date of manufacture is last September -- I guess Amazon doesn't sell a lot of these.

Anyway, my HDTune tests always show downward spikes that put the minimum xfer speeds in the single digits.

Is this common with Velociraptors??

Please advise. Thanks.

P.S. I did read on Anandtech that they had optimization issues with a VR drive they received, and after getting a new one from WD showed a clean HDTune run.

 

[Elixer]

What OS & hardware you got?
Post a pic of HDtune.

 

[jmsabatini]

Originally posted by: Elixer
What OS & hardware you got?
Post a pic of HDtune.

Sorry, should have included more details.

I have Vista x64 Ultimate, P6T6 WS Revolution, Core i7 920 OC'd to 3.2, and 6GB.

I also have two other drives in the system, both WD 640GB Blues, and their HDTunes are completely normal.

The raptor is my primary/boot drive.

I can't see how to post a pic in these forums.

But to summarize an HDTune I just ran on the raptor:
Xfer Minimum: 11.2 MB/sec
Xfer Maximum: 121.9 MB/sec
Xfer Average: 98.3 MB/sec
Access Time: 6.9 ms
Burst Rate: 176.2 MB/sec
CPU Usage: 1.7%

HDTune is being run on Fast with 64KB blocks.

The tests with the raptor always have 4 or 5 big drops, with at least one dip going close to, or into, the single digits.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Did you set the HD tune options to "accurate" rather than "fast"? I see those type of results with my OS drives. I recently reformatted an old 150 Raptor and its clean with nothing on it and there are no drops like that. But that was only one test.

 

[jmsabatini]

I did not set Accurate vs. Fast because I see no issues on my other two drives.

Does Accurate mode typically avoid these kinds of precipitous drops in minimum xfer rate?

Thanks.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I think it does, but not sure. I guess the only true test would be to just wipe it, format it without an OS and with no files on it, run HD tune.

EDIT: It seems the more info on the drive the slower the readings are. Can anyone else confirm this?

When I first installed my Fujitsu SCSI with the OS, I was getting max transfers of 127mb; min of 66mb; and average of 113mb. Now with a few games installed its down to 120mb max, 102mb average, 67mb min and burst of 111.7mb