InterviewSolution
Saved Bookmarks
InterviewSolution
| 1. |
Solve : HD mystery - slower than 2001 IDE drives? |
|
Answer» I have a bit of a mystery with a brand new factory-installed Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drive installed in a relative's new HP Pavilion desktop. How was the drive partitioned and formatted? Mac -- Thanks for your replies. The lag in seek time was noted both before and after I did a fresh XP install. The seek average was ~15.5 ms in the 'just brought home from Best Buy' condition, and the seek average was still ~15.5 ms after I did a complete reinstall of XP and reformat. In its current state, the drive was formatted using the XP install CD program. There is an initial small 1GB FAT32 partition just for the sake of having a DOS-bootable partition there. Then, the remaining and subsequent partitions use NFTS. The drivers for the chipset were immediately updated to a Nov 2005 version just after the reinstall of XP. It has an ASUS motherboard with the AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz) processor. It has integrated video, so I used ATI's chipset drivers for this update. I suppose I should be happy with the average MB/s and Burst rates reflected above in my original post. But this average seek of ~15.5 ms is really bugging me. It doesn't seem to fit, and Seagate says it should be around 9.0 ms. I am waiting for the computer owner to send me the chkdsk reports on the partitions, and I'll let you know what is learned. Thanks again. Should be interesting. Manufacturers often produce goods which are rated. Wrist-watches are a usual example, as they can be rated A through to F, if I remember correctly. Quality control determines which are A and which are F as there is all too often a discrepancy in quality and performance. I wouldn't know how to tell on a hard-drive, btw. Best buy you say. Well, maybe the drive will improve with use, especially if chkdsk /r is used frequently, as much of the magnetised surface has been lying dormant for some time and I SUSPECT that there may be some shelf-life before use effect. (Pure speculation I have to say.) FYI You shouldn't need the filter to achieve UDMA6 with either XP SP1 or XP SP2 Has the drive had a burn-in test? (Bug report: Wristwatches , written above as Wrist-watches. If I don't use the hyphen the misspelling shows.)Mac -- Here is the chkdsk report on one of the NTFS partitions. It's the partition containing the XP SP2 install. See anything of note??? Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) COPYRIGHT 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. E:\WINDOWS>chkdsk The type of the file system is NTFS. Volume label is WindowsXP. WARNING! F parameter not specified. Running CHKDSK in read-only mode. CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)... File verification completed. CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)... Index verification completed. CHKDSK is verifying security DESCRIPTORS (stage 3 of 3)... Security descriptor verification completed. 31455238 KB total disk space. 4416188 KB in 24797 files. 7888 KB in 1922 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 93814 KB in use by the system. 65536 KB occupied by the log file. 26937348 KB available on disk. 4096 bytes in each allocation unit. 7863809 total allocation units on disk. 6734337 allocation units available on disk. Quote It's using a driver 5.1.2535.0 dated 01-Jul-01 which I believe are the standard legacy drivers. Wouldn't legacy drivers indictae drivers for SOMETHING 'old'? Quote Mac -- Not unless you can. Is this install fully updated post SP2? Is it a converted volume, from FAT32 to NTFS, or was it formatted directly to NTFS? Converting can produce a performance loss. How does the file structure look in the defrag window? Is there a lot of red showing? |
|