bad partition?

P

push

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 20, 2010
Messages
184
I recently purchased a samsung spinpoint hd204ui 2tb. Following directions I saw here I formatted the drive on windows 7 using the defaults thinking it would align it. Installed the drive on the windows xp machine and it does not appear to be working correctly. I don't want to uninstall the drive and swap it back in to the windows machine, so I downloaded gparted if I need to redo the partition again. Does this look like a mis-alignment problem?

smarthf.jpg

smart2x.jpg

wtfoe.jpg
 
Weird, it is showing that drive as being optimally aligned using paragon alignment tool. Let me try a different SATA cable.
 
Another thing I've noticed is in HD tune when I run a error scan it will scan really quick for a second, then slow down for a few seconds, then scan really quick, then slow down for a few. When I do the same quick scan on my wd 740 gig it scans about the same speed all the way through. It's almost like it's bottlenecked by something.
 
Yeah that HDTune shot does not look right. Try wiping the drive clear again and format again in Windows 7.
 
Yea I just did a full re-format in xp, took 9+ hours. After that I ran the re-alignment tool expecting it to be out of alignment, and it still said it was in alignment. HD tune still looks like crap.
 
I do not have a good explanation for this. The SMART data does not look bad. There were 5 CRC errors but as long as this is low I do not see this being a problem.
 
starting to wonder if I just got a dud drive. May bring it back and just get the WD EARS drive. May not be as fast, but I've had good luck with WD and these drives are for storage only so doesn't need to be crazy fast.
 
have you updated the firmware to fix the known issues with the drive?

70 mb/sec average write speed isnt bad for a 5400 rpm drive. it is strange that it spins up and down like that though... what are the specs of the rest of the PC? is this the boot drive?

do you ever notice this behavior in normal usage or is it only showing up in benchmarks? maybe HDtune is reading how fast it fills the cache, then waits for it to write, and then fills the cache again...?
 
ghost6303 said:
have you updated the firmware to fix the known issues with the drive?

70 mb/sec average write speed isnt bad for a 5400 rpm drive. it is strange that it spins up and down like that though... what are the specs of the rest of the PC? is this the boot drive?

do you ever notice this behavior in normal usage or is it only showing up in benchmarks? maybe HDtune is reading how fast it fills the cache, then waits for it to write, and then fills the cache again...?
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It's a c2d e6600, 2 gigs ram, win xp. This drive should be able to do way better than 70MB/s sequential writes. I was thinking about turning off write caching to see if that helped, maybe I'll give it a go.
 
push said:
This drive should be able to do way better than 70MB/s sequential writes.
Click to expand...

what number are you expecting here?

have you updated the firmware to fix the known issues with the drive?
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im interested in the answer to this, as the bug relates to write command queing, which could be affecting you.

some windows xp services can hog resources, depending on what you are doing, which could take priority over your benchmarks. or if there is background disk usage and the heads have to track back and forth to two different locations at the same time it would cause exactly that. normally seek time is around 8-10ms for a single read/write (8.9ms average it says for that drive). 20-30ms would indicate more than one thing is trying to access the disk at the same time.
 
ghost6303 said:
what number are you expecting here?


im interested in the answer to this, as the bug relates to write command queing, which could be affecting you.

some windows xp services can hog resources, depending on what you are doing, which could take priority over your benchmarks. or if there is background disk usage and the heads have to track back and forth to two different locations at the same time it would cause exactly that. normally seek time is around 8-10ms for a single read/write (8.9ms average it says for that drive). 20-30ms would indicate more than one thing is trying to access the disk at the same time.
Click to expand...
Yes, I've applied the firmware patch, it was one of the first things I did. Ran f4eg.exe from a boot disk before I even formatted. I would expect a normal hdtune result (smooth), I think people are seeing an average of 100MB\s on this drive with a max latency of 13 ms. There is absolutely nothing else accessing this drive that I can see, there is nothing on the drive.
 
Looks like I figured out why the drive was performing so weird. Running HD Health while hdtune was running causes the terrible drops in the graphs. Not sure what it's doing, but it is causing the drive to bomb. First 50% of the test I had HD Health running, then I clicked exit on the 2nd half of the test. I have flashed using f4eg to the latest firmware, did I use the wrong flash utility and that's why it's bombing or is hd health doing something weird?

hmmmmu.jpg


One thing I did notice in HD Tune was the when it polls the S.M.A.R.T. information it does take a second for it to come back at which point the app becomes a bit unresponive. I'm wondering if the constant polling of S.M.A.R.T. was causing the drops in the drive performance.
 
I'm wondering if the constant polling of S.M.A.R.T. was causing the drops in the drive performance
Click to expand...

Probably. F4s seem to take longer than other drives to return the smart data.
 
drescherjm said:
Probably. F4s seem to take longer than other drives to return the smart data.
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Has to be it, ran another app that pulls the data and it takes a good while for it to return. All that time wasted and a good drive returned. Damn it. Oh well, now I know better.
 
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