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[PIC!] New Harddrive is slow? Slow seek time?

edro

edro

Lifer
I got a new Maxtor 250gb 7200rpm 8mb cache for $130 no rebate at Microcenter.

New, Retail box, sealed.

Well, It is my main drive now, and I have noticed that it makes that "grinding sound" when it uses the hard drive. Old computers used to do this a lot, but I haven't noticed it for a while with my other drives.

For example, when I click on the Start button, then Programs, then Accessories, then whatever, going through those menus, each time it tried to open the next folder (in the menu), it pauses for a second and "grinds". It's like the seek time for this thing is huge. It's not just the Start Menu... its all hard drive activity, like browsing through Explorer and all that too.

THe noise doesn't bother me, because I work with older computers, and some of their "grinding" sound is loud as hell and they do it all the time.

Here is a pic of my HDDTach.
Is that slow? Normal?

THANKS!
 
Viruses/worms/Trojans come to mind. When you did your fresh installation, was your computer at any time exposed to your broadband connection directly without a firewall (hardware or software or both) in place to protect it? The Secure Is Good link in my sig has suggestions for how to get past the vulnerable just-been-built stage of the game without worm infections, so you might look at that.
 
Well, I downloaded the new HDTach and it says I have about 5% CPU utilization. I wonder why the old one says it is about 35%?
 
Originally posted by: edro13
Well, I downloaded the new HDTach and it says I have about 5% CPU utilization. I wonder why the old one says it is about 35%?
Click to expand...
Hmm, good one 😕 Anyway, my suspicion is that your Maxtor just happens to have more-audible seeks than some other drives. If you want something quieter, I heard (haha) that the Samsungs are pretty much the last word in quietness, and the Seagate 7200.7's are pretty mellow too.

Personally, I don't mind seek noise if it's getting the job done quickly. 😀 But to each his own.
 
yeah the grinding sound is normal. my seagate barracuda V was a grinding monster. If it really bothers you, like mechBfon said, get a samsung preferably one with the harder to find NIDEC FDB motors.
 
I would RMA that drive, or return it. Loud seeks are one thing; grinding noises are another. If it is in fact truely "grinding", and it seems to sometimes "stall" when trying to access something, then that probably means that it is having trouble reading and is re-seeking. That's not a good sign. You should install a SMART tool, and check out the diagnostic numbers for "raw read errors", "hardware ecc corrected", "seek error rate", and some others. Especially "reallocated sectors" and "pending reallocations". If there are any, definately return the drive, new drives shouldn't have that problem at all.

One thing to note about Maxtor drives though, for some reason, as they come from the factory, they have a mode set, where every freshly-written sector does a read-after-write verify. If you start HDTach, and do the full write-testing (warning: data-destructive!), or use PowMax to "write zeros" to the disk, then you will see, that write speeds are half of what they should be, the first time that you write to certain sectors.

But neither of those should cause any "grinding" sounds.
 
It's a seek noise, but I call it grinding... 🙂 My older Maxtors (80gb and 120gb) and Western Digital drives aren't nearly as loud though.
 
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