Very Poor HDD Seek Time

[WobbleWobble]

i just got an Asus A7N8X-DX with the latest BIOS and am using HD Tach 2.61 to benchmark my Maxtor DM+9 120GB 8MB. I'm using the ATA133 connection as a sole Primary Master with no other drives on the channel.

HD Tach reports my seek time around the 30ms area and acoustic sound management is disabled. My read and burst speeds are normal so is my CPU utilization.

Tried different cables, using the latest nForce 2 drivers and tried reverting back to the MS IDE drivers.

Any ideas?

 

[MDE]

bump

 

[mechBgon]

Does the system seem slow? I had one Maxtor about a year ago that came with a sticky actuator (or that's my deduction). It passed MaxBlast testing fine, but its performance was just ludicrously lethargic. I RMA'ed it.

 

[een]

Now I am not sure about the normal performance of your hard drive, but is it in dma mode? Untick "Compress drive to save disk space" to speed up reading from the drive. Untick "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching", in properties section of hd...

Try it anyway

 

[WobbleWobble]

It does feel slow and yes, it's in DMA mode (DMA mode 6). Well, I wouldn't think that the disk compression would be much use as HD Tach doesn't care about the file system on the HDD so it wouldn't care about NTFS compression.

Nothing I think is accessing the HDD at the same time the test is running, I don't hear it or see the IDE light flashing or anything. It passed MaxBlast too, I was kind of hoping for an error code so I could RMA it easier. But I'll look into RMAing because of poor performance.

The typical seek time for this drive should be around 9-13ms, probably closer to the 12ms mark.

 

[OverVolt]

Try knocking it down to DMA5 and see if that helps ATA133 is useless anyway. Suprised no one said to defrag yet! I know with a fresh install of windows XP i always have a fragged up HD

 

[WobbleWobble]

I wouldn't think that a defrag would help as HD Tach doesn't really test files per se, but I defragged anyways and it's still the same.

Bumping it down to DMA5 didn't help either.

 

[Jeff7]

Download and install AIDA32. In its Storage section, click on SMART. If your drive and motherboard support SMART, which they should (SMART might be disabled in BIOS though; look for an option there if it is), the hard drive(s) will appear there. Check for anything that's failing outright there, or also look at read/write/seek error rates. My mom's PC had an utterly lethargic drive - I'm talking like 5 minutes to boot WinXP, and a full minute (approx) to load Internet Explorer. This was a T-bird 700 system, with an ATA66 drive. AIDA32 reported that the drive was experiencing write errors; I ran chkdsk and it found bad sectors. Drive got replaced.

 

[WobbleWobble]

I low level formatted my HDD using MaxBlast and it looks like it helped. It's now comparable with my other identical drive. But both seek times are still around the 17ms mark... I'm still thinking that's a bit high, but at least it doesn't feel sluggish anymore.