New Samsung HD204UI Oddity

[skeeder]

I purchased the new Samsung Seagate HD204UI. Install it yesterday. Formatted it, ran some program to make sure it was aligned, and checked it for bad sectors.

Everything passes.

Then I fired up the benchmark of HD Tune. And this happened.

Frankly, I've never seen this with any of my other drives. Any clue what it is? I've read somewhere that Intel controllers have some cache and this them clearing out the cash before accessing the drive, but I am unsure.

Thanks!

 

[drescherjm]

Any chance that any other software is using the drive? I see similar graphs every time when I run hdtune on an OS drive or a drive that the virus checker is actively scanning..


Other than that have you looked at the SMART data. Since you are running HDTune check the health tab.

 

[skeeder]

SMART comes back clean. I didn't think about the virus scanner since the drive was empty at the time.

 

[drescherjm]

This is an old version of HDTune, does it show the raw data for SMART attributes 197 and 198?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

If either of these attributes raw values are not zero you will also see this pattern.

 

[skeeder]

Thanks for the help. SMART Comes back and I'm am unable to see raw data on those two. I am guessing if its zero it does not show it?

The benchmark is acting normal now. Very Odd...perhaps there was something I didn't know running on the disk at the time.

 

[mwroobel]

Any time you see a sawtooth pattern like that, there is something else interfering with the benchmark. As mentioned above, it is usually a Virus Scanner, but I have also seen backup utils, sync utils and Media Servers (Plex in particular as it monitors for changes in the filesystem.