Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[fzabkar]

Cantbecanit, the OP's "problem" cannot possibly be a driver issue. The curves are just too perfect -- they show all 17 zones without any hint of a plateau. If there were a driver limitation, then one would expect to see throttling at the outer zones. Notice also that the ratio of minimum to maximum data transfer rate is about the same for each drive, which once again confirms that there is no throttling of performance due to external hardware or software.

[Cantbecanit]

You'd know more than me on that side of things Franc, but look at it head on, two drives playing up, replaced with two more that are still playing up, if that isn't something to do with the users PC I'd be very surprised.

[barracuda378]

Cantbecanit, of the two replacements, one performs just as well as the best of the first three drives.

I have flashed BIOS, updated Intel INF and RST drivers, and even tried older drivers, and the result was the same.  I physically swapped the drives to control for cables, ports, and location (vibration), and the speeds followed the drives.

At this point I am not trying to improve the speed of the remaining "slow" drive of the three that I kept, as I am using the two "fast" drives in RAID 0 and the "slow" drive only for backup, where it is fast enough.  I posted an update to let others know of my experience.  I cannot recommend these drives for performance applications unless one can cherry-pick drives or is willing to do the exchange juggle as needed.  Nevertheless, the "fast" samples perform well.

[fzabkar]

It's not possible to improve the speed of the "slow" drives, or any drive for that matter. The drives are already performing as best they can. The data transfer rate is directly related to the number of bits per track. More bits per track means more bytes per second. It's as simple as that. :-)

If you really want to know what the drive is doing, then purchase a TTL RS232 adapter and connect to the drive's serial diagnostic port. Issue a Ctrl-Z (reset), followed by a Ctrl-L (sign-on). The drive will then then report sectors per track, tracks per zone, data rate, etc. These data should then put an end to all our speculation and supposition.

See this thread:
http://forum.hddguru.com/seagate-7200-t10899.html

If you're still not convinced that drivers or external hardware are not constraining the drives' performance, then here are two examples which demonstrate the effect of certain external problems:

Here is a PIO problem that shows up as a flat line:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/578i57B081BFC27A0E39/image-size/original?v=mpb...

Here is a case where the interface appears to be the limiting factor:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/963i57D874EA9C3BDA60/image-size/original?v=mpb...

Notice the 100MB/s plateau at the outer zones.

[Cantbecanit]

Just had a look, these are Green drives  http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=2035439d45c0b210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&vgnextchann... they aren't meant for rapid performance tbh, you need the XT series for that bud.

I would re-consider how you use them tbh, if they are left in a raid set up I think you will be back here in 6 mths time asking why they are dead.

[barracuda378]

Cantbecanit, that is a discomforting statement.  Are you suggesting that RAID kills drives, or that the green drives cannot be used normally without damage?  These are for a personal computer, not a file server.   Is there a hidden specification that says these cannot handle a normal desktop duty cycle?

[fzabkar]

I haven't heard of RAID killing drives, but one problem that "green" drives have in desktop systems is that they are often internally preprogrammed to spin down after a certain amount of idle time. You can sometimes use a utility such as hdparm to alter the APM (Advanced Power Management) setting. However, this may not be possible when the drive is behind a RAID controller.

One other important consideration for RAIDs is whether a drive supports ERC (Error Recovery Control). ERC specifies the maximum time allowed for a drive to retry errors during a read or write command. Typical timeouts for a RAID are 7 seconds. If a drive takes longer than this to respond to a read/write command, then the RAID controller may drop it from the array.

[Cantbecanit]

I have, but I can't find where I read it again, it's only one spec of raid that does it though.

Anyway back to the user, what I am saying is you have an ecoslow drive, and afaik these are really manual back up drives or simple one drive PC drives, i.e they don't lend themselves to the sort of person who likes to build and configure He Man PC's, or another example is trying to enter a race at the Nurburgring in a 1.3 VW Polo and wonder why all the Porsches are out of sight in seconds, anyway if you want to Raid it's always best to have identical drives  with the same speed ratings throughout, ( I guess you kinda have already )  I just don't want you scratching your head and getting into an RMA chain, you really need some 7200 RPM drives for this set up.