36gb raptor very slow

Hi,

I have had this drive for about 3 months, and it is very loud when accessing, and i just ran the filesystem benchmark in sisoftware sandra and got 30mb/s! Even my 120gb maxtor manages 44, so is it broken? what speed should it be getting?

Also any more harddisk benchmark tools i could try?
thanks.

Did you defrag your HDD recently?
How much free space does it have?

hi, yer defragged it. 8.66gb free.

Try WesternDigitals Diagnostic Tool found in one of the Storage forum stickies.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=127203

tom_ed1987 said:

8.66gb free.

Click to expand...

Try to free up some more space, transfer rates decrease when you get closer to the center of the platter.

Put in another way:
The density (amount of bits it can hold per square mm, cm, inch...) of a HDD platter is the same from beginning to end (Outer/Inner tracks), the rotational speed of the platter is also fixed (4200 RPM, 5400 RPM, 7200 RPM, 10000 RPM and 15000 RPM).

When a drive is new and (almost) empty data is written to the outer tracks, now as the outer track can hold more data than the inner track, it's (or should be) obvious that reading from (or writting to) the outer track goes faster, as more data passes under the heads, because it takes just as long to make one rotation for the inner and outer track.

Hope that was clear.

If you think there's something wrong with your HDD do what musawi suggested.

thanks KILLorBE, perfectly clear.

although i didnt realise a harddisk was filled starting at the edges of the disk, i thought it was filled in "sectors" going from the centre to the edge.

So does that mean that the stuff at the edges of the disk will be the fastest to access, and will be some of the first things i installed? if so isnt there any way you can "move" things around to dfferent parts of the disk?

ill try freeing up space anyway and see if it helps.

tom_ed1987 said:

i thought it was filled in "sectors" going from the centre to the edge.

Click to expand...

No it starts at the edge going to the centre, you're right about the sectors, but talking about that would make it much more complicated.

tom_ed1987 said:

So does that mean that the stuff at the edges of the disk will be the fastest to access, and will be some of the first things i installed? if so isnt there any way you can "move" things around to dfferent parts of the disk?

Click to expand...

No, access time (seek time) hardly ever degrades, but transfer rates do, seek time basicly depends on 2 things:
Cache, If the data is stored in cache seek time is really low.
Where the head is, If the head needs to move from the centre to the edge seek time takes a little longer.
But I doubt you'll ever notice the difference as the average seek time of current HDD's is <10mS.

^^ this is why some defragers like diskkeeper or norton will place system files on the outer plater for you to let your O/S load faster and other programs you use frequently.