Sluggish disk(s)

mubs

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Sorry, long post!

Admittedly, my OS install is long in the tooth; installed almost exactly 4 years ago. I am dreading reinstallation of all the sw, the utilities, the tweaks, etc.

But while the system is generally ok, disk throughput seems poor.

I had 2 Hibachi 250 GB SATA drives in the system. These began to develop bad sectors (or so I believed). I had purchased 2 Samsung 320GB SATA drives in 2007, but never installed them. I now purchased an additional Hibachi 1TB drive (Deskstar 7K1000.C) with the intention of using the 3 drives.

I used an external drive to copy data from the old drives, replaced them with the 3 drives with the 1TB being the boot drive, and restored my OS image and data. I had many hiccups using the 1TB because Partition Magic 8 kept buggering it and I didn't realize it was PM.

I finally restored the OS image to the 1TB, but after booting, strange things happened. Some folders that I created 2 levels down from the root of C: were gone. Wordperfect, which was working before, now asks for the installation disk when I try to run it. I don't know what happened and if these symptoms are connected to the sluggish I/O.

All the drives have multiple partitions. The 1TB Hibachi seems especially slow.

After installing the new drives but before using them, I ran Hibachi's and Samsung's utilities extensively on the drives, and the reports came clean. Device Mangler looks good: I have one UDMA2, one UDMA 3 and three UDMA 6 drives (I have 2 opticals). Write caching is turned on for all the drives (I have a UPS as well). Event log shows nothing. BIOS settings were checked. SMART settings checked via SpeedFan (even the extended checks) rate as:

Hibachi: 91% for both fitness and performance (3 values are "Normal", the rest are "Very Good")
Sam-A: 100% for performance, 98% for fitness (all values are "Very Good")
Sam-B: 100% for performance, 98% for fitness (all values are "Very Good" except Airflow temperature = "Good".)

I ran some tests on all of them; no idea if performance is in the ballpark or piss-poor. The test file was a 2GB OS image file that was copied from one SATA drive to another. All partitions were fully defragged first.

For simplicity, I am calling the Hibachi Hib. The two 320GB Samsungs are named Sam-A and Sam-B. Sequence-wise, the system shoud see the Hibachi, then Sam-A then Sam-B. The swap file is on Sam-320-B in the first partition.

These are the results:

Code:
----------------------------
Source | Destin. |   MB/S
----------------------------
Sam-B  | Sam-A   |   74.3
Sam-A  | Sam-B   |   71.8
----------------------------
Sam-A  | HIB     |   85.2
HIB    | Sam-A   |   80.7
----------------------------

Do these numbers look normal?
 
Firstly, would you mind not referring to a 100 year old company, apparently the 3rd largest 'technology company' in the world with 400,000 employees, as a type of grill? I have nothing but fond memories of all sorts of Hitachi products over a 40-year span and I'd like to keep it that way. :p

Yes, the numbers seem reasonable. Obviously, file copies are limited by the slowest drive.

Ironically, the PC in front of me contains both a Samsung 250GB and Hitachi 1TB drive, so I'm in a pretty good position to compare with your rig.

Subjectively, the Hitachi feels significantly faster to me.

Instead of one large file, gather a few thousand small files and test with them. It sounds like you're experiencing sluggishness while browsing the drive?
 
If anything they are too fast. The UDMA-2 drive should max out at 33 MB/s and the UDMA-3 should max out at 44MB/s. See: UMDA Transfer rates

Unless you are doing some form of RAID I would never expect any better than 80-90MB/s and these are older drives on an older machine.
 
70-80 MB/sec. is fine for copying files from a single drive to another. You'll only achieve 100+ on empty drives for large, sequential transfers. Do disk benchmarks such as HDTach, Atto and HD Tune return typical results?
 
I have very fond memories, not so distant, of a wonderful woman that worked for Hitachi in South San Francisco...yum....
 
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