Ken1943 said:
The HDtune run on the Toshiba shows a graph that is really all over the
place up and down. Lowest speed is 1m/sec. The EEE PC shows a much more
stable graph.
The Toshiba drive is a Fujitsu.
The EEE PC is a seagate.
Now if I can blame the drive or the chipset is another matter.
Don't know if I want to spend $60 to find out. A ssd is out of the
question price wise as both netbooks are only used when I travel.
KenW
Was the antivirus software disabled when the Fujitsu was being evaluated ?
You can't really afford to have any conflicting software running at
the same time, as otherwise you'll get some very low downward spikes,
when the drive head is doing nothing but seeks back to back.
If you're absolutely sure Indexing, AV, and the like are turned off,
there are no other backups or the like running, then download a
diagnostic for the disk. The computer could even decide to do a
system restore point (but that only happens once a week now).
Some of the disk diagnostic programs, are stand alone boot systems.
And when you boot with the diagnostic disc, there won't be any other software to
interfere. At a minimum the diagnostic will check the SMART statistics,
run a few simple tests. Usually, a longer test scans the disk surface
(but that isn't necessary, if you fail the short test anyway). On the
down-side, I've noticed that the version of FreeDOS included on
diagnostic packages like that, as trouble running on modern hardware.
I have diagnostics that fail to run on my Core2 P5E motherboard, and
they also fail to run on my new laptop. They do seem to work on my older
hardware (like my P4 Northwood system).
http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=ServicesSupport/FujitsuDrives/SoftwareUtilities
*******
Another thing you can try, is use the HDTune bad block scan (rightmost tab).
Let it scan the entire disk surface. I have one disk here, that behaved
differently after a simple single read pass over the entire surface. The
downward spikes weren't quite as bad on the next benchmark run.
Some drives now, have 4KB sectors, and 512 byte emulation is layered on top
of it. Windows 7 has native 4KB support (there was a patch a while back for it).
Again, I've noticed some strange things with my last three 500GB disks,
in that they have a block size dependency. To give an example, I was
doing block transfers in 1MB chunks (usually bigger chunks work better),
and got only 30% of the transfer speed that could be achieved by reducing
the chunk size to 32768 bytes. I've seen something similar, when dropping all
the way down to 4KB sized chunks in a transfer. And if I specified non-power-of-two
values for transfer size, that also affected performance. I *never* used to see
that on any of my old drives. Your Fujitsu probably won't have that,
as I don't know to what extent Fujitsu got on the "4KB bandwagon" with
the other manufacturers. I thought Fujitsu got rid of at least some
of their storage manufacturing, and I don't know whether they make drives
any more or not. About all that's left now, is Seagate and Western Digital,
as the others disappeared or were bought out. Quite a bit of market
consolidation has occurred. I think even the independent companies
that used to make platters, they got bought up too.
Paul
