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

[simonak]

I install this drive as a replacment into my laptop running windows7. I know seagate have little worse seek times but I measure in HD Tach and HD tunes seeks arround 28ms. My old WD had seeks arround 18ms.

I already tried run the tools to see if there is any silent options I can turn off but I didnt find anything.

Is it posible to get any firmare I can try if that will fix the problem?

Exact model is ST9500325AS 500gb and was pulled from seagate expansion partable drive.

[fzabkar]

Could you upload HD Tune's performance graph to a file sharing site? I suspect that the slower seek times could be due to read retries. The graph may show this.

What is your drive's current firmware version?

[simonak]

here is the picture of the benchmark

and the firmware is 002BSM1

[fzabkar]

I can't see any retries in that graph. If there had been retries, I would have expected to see two monotonically increasing sets of data points spaced by about 11 msec. That's the time required for an additional rotation of the platters at 5400 RPM.

Are you sure your drive doesn't have AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) enabled? That would account for some increase in seek times, although I don't know by how much.

[simonak]

I did try sea tool dos version but under advanced settings I didnt find any options about AAM. Thats why I wanna try diffrent firmware because Im worried they made the external drive seek slover. Or do u know any other software I can use to see or change settings?

Well after some search looks like IBM tool might works because seagate didnt have the option to change AAM for some reason. I dont have my notebook here so I gonna try it monday.

[fzabkar]

I believe any of the following should be able to alter the AAM settings.

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

HDAT2/CBL Hard Disk Repair Utility:
http://www.hdat2.com/

IBM/HITACHI Drive Feature Tool:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2006.01.20-Hitachi-Drive-Feature-Tool/

[simonak]

I did try all tools even seagate Seaaam and all show that the drive dosnt support AAM. Is it posible there is some problem with intel ICH7 chipset?

[fzabkar]

I can't see how the chipset could affect seek performance. Is there any hint of seek or read problems in the SMART results?

I wonder if the drive's firmware slows down the seeking if the drive is having difficulty picking up the servo information???

The only other thing I can think of is that there may be something wrong with either of the R499 or R332 current sense resistors near the motor and voice coil control chip (SH6966, bottom LH corner):
http://obrazki.elektroda.net/7_1258713536.jpg

I believe these resistors sense the current in the spindle motor and voice coil.

FYI, here is a page of HD Tune Test Results:
http://www.hdtune.com/testresults.html

BTW, thanks for the reference to SEAAAM.

[simonak]

[fzabkar]

I don't see any read or seek problems in the SMART report. However, the normalised Seek Error Rate attribute values only become meaningful once the number of seeks exceeds 1 million. Currently it appears that the drive has experienced 336,947 seeks. Furthermore, HD Tune's author is only reporting the lower 32 bits of each 48-bit raw value. The upper 16 bits of the raw SER attribute contain the number of seek errors. These are not visible in the report.

In short, I have no idea why the access time is so poor. :-(

Page 10 of the product manual (page 16 of PDF) states that the average and full stroke seek times are 14ms and 30ms, respectively. At 5400 RPM, the average rotational latency is 5.5 ms. This would make the average access time 19.5ms.

Momentus 5400.6 SATA Product Manual, Rev. E:
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/notebook/momentus/5400.6%20(Wyatt)/100528359e.pdf