Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Originally posted by: tagej
There's something funky going on with a couple of maxtor drives (they randomly start working REALLY slow, and then for no reason start working normally a few days later. Some usenet posts mention updated firmware was released at some point, but there's no mention of it on the Maxtor site or in their knowledgebase.
I had somewhat similar problems with a 60GB single-platter DM+9 drive that I had purchased last year. It always had some wierd occasional system-slowdown issues, and the SMART data for "Seek time measurements" was slightly on the low side. That was true ever since I first installed it. Anyways, it died in only about six months. My unproven diagnosis is that the drive suffered head damage as a result of improper handling (box dropped during shipment?), and had issues properly registering over the track, and then some day something just went. Either that, or the FDB bearing failed catastrophically. I never heard a head-slap type "ping" noise from the drive, but one time I heard the most horrible whining noise during a spin-up. It failed probably about a week after that. I originally thought that perhaps the FDB had leaked, which is I suppose a possiblity, but the fact that it had always had seek issues seems to indicate a longer-standing problem.
I swore off Maxtor drives for some time, but recently purchased a couple due to sales, a 250GB and a 160GB DM+9, both with 80GB platters.
I too actually was wondering about a firmware update, because the write performance under HDTach 2.61, on a Promise Ultra100 TX2, seems to be a bit off. I only get about 30MB/s writes, and initially I only got 13MB/s during the first week of installation, and the graph is basically a straight line, not a slow sloping curve like the read graph. That suggests to me that there is some firmware issue affecting write speeds.
I also looked up some XBitLabs articles, talking about the DM+9 introductions, and the different platter sizes, and how there were two different firmware revisions, one for 60GB platters, and one for 80GB platters. My 250GB drive shows a mfg date of April 2004, and yet it has the same firmware revision that XBitLabs talks about for 80GB/platter drives, more than a year ago.
Also, some other web sites that I looked at, showing performance comparisons in RAID, showed the Maxtor DM+9s consistently at the bottom of the pack. Not by a whole lot, but just very consistently slower.
So I too, am on the lookout for a potential performance-enhancing firmware update for these things.
So far not a whole lot of luck.....
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