Western Digital On Top?

[Austin]

Biggest problem with warranties is how tight costs are, pricing sells as most people think little about RMA in advance. Also the 7200rpm technology is more prone to both heat and failure so I think that's another big factor in switching to 1 year. 1 year does suck so IMHO spend that little more in the first place to get a 3 year model.

I can vouch for Maxtor's RMA service too, it is prompt but IIRC there is a lot of info to fill in and it is a pain in the a$$ to have to ship to Rep Ireland as it more than doubles the postage. Still it is quick and I got a 60GB 5400rpm replaced with an 80GB 7200rpm so needless to say I'm happy over all.

[Nemeliza]

Id also have to go with Maxtor god bless the Diamondmax

[drunkenmaster]

Oh yeah, forgot to say for all you raptor lovers.

from what i've seen, peopel are hitting 38k or so in sisoft with one, 70kish with raid 0 setup. Reason i don't liek them is, i score 39k with my 120gig sata maxtor dm9+, and with the two i jsut threw on a raid 0, they are scoring around 74k, thats at £80 a drive, 120gig 240gig raid 0 74k array, i jsut can't justify the cost of the raptor. I would whole heartedly recommend them to anyone running a very important homeserver, a site they want to grow quickly, at minimal cost, or something. They are good for multiple loads of small info. But the maxtors are very good all rounders, and thats shown in most benchmarks with a win.

they=roxor

I do love my ibm 180gxp though, it feels so responsive, and both the maxtor and ibm are seriously quiet. The 180gxp only has 60gig platter density though, the newer 250gxp has a 80gig density, and will be by far the latest, maybe read as most mature(i will hope) sata interface. So not only were they fast before with added density probably bringing that next small jump in scores, (i'm guessing a 42k sisoft score). The sata might jsut be that much better, IBM firmware has always been rock solid for raid performance, so two in raid might just be completely stupidly fast.

PS, has anyone seen a 250GXP on review, anywhere? they are quite old now, first pata ones were available coming up to 6-8 weeks ago now. the sata in the last 2 weeks, bit less. I woulda thought i would have seen some reviews, a couple weeks before available. Could be blind

[Austin]

Originally posted by drunkenmaster
i score 39k with my 120gig sata maxtor dm9+,

Any idea why my Maxtor 120GB SATA150 7200-8 is scoring only 27k? I was sure my Maxtor 120GB ATA133 7200-8 scored more than that although I think that was a little behind the 'norm' too. All the bms suggest the SATA150 is faster, more than just a move to the SATA interface like we saw from Seagate for example.

I have an Abit NF7-S v2.0 nForce2 ultra400 (onboard SATA). I have a LiteOn CDRW as Master on IDE0 and a LiteOn DVDROM as Master on IDE1. I'm using the latest drivers, updates and BIOS on WinXP Pro SP1 and have disabled background tasks. Is this due to nVidia's inferior IDE perf in general (inferior to SiS and Intel), using SATA & PATA or due to the SATA using the PCI bus perhaps?

[drunkenmaster]

nope, seen some good scores on nvidia chipsets, smoe better than on my canterwood, PS, has anyone yet seen an onboard sata drive on intergrated southy perform better, mine are scoring high, but my pata 120gig scores the same. they also score teh same on sil image chipset.

Errm , should deffo be faster than that, very much faster. i can't really think why it would be that slow tbh. errm, defragged it? that is a major sisoft problem a bunch of other apps show below normal, but not bad results on a fragmented drive, but sisoft seems to die from them. Try that, errm, how full is it? what bios version, using latest drivers from abit website for sil image chip, with latest bios. Can't think what else tbh.

PS i don't at all think theres a real benefit with sata drives yet, just diff controllers, nowt else really. Remember, seagate pata and sata drives, in teh abarracuda versions, are designed for low noise home app levels, and sell a lot by doing it, they run very slow by comparison, their 7200.7's run a lot faster though, very close to maxtor and ibm, they also have higher rated noise levels.

I think basically, due to the padding on the barra's, they have to run slower or they'd overheat, and with only 1 year warranties, and me, and several m8's having them running very very hot, i won't get one again.

Anyway, i can't really think of any reason it shoudl run that slow, bar being fragmented to hell. Only other thing i can think of is, things like, if you right click on a partition in windows explorer, hit properties and disable indexing service, and a few other tweaks you can read up on in tweaktown.com bah, i can't find link as aol 56k = slow slow slow for now, look up guides or articles, soething like, windows xp reformat to relax, has some hard drive tweaks hidden up in there.

[Austin]

Over 30GB free, 512MB RAM, NTFS filesystem with usual cluster size (4k IIRC). Anyway I tried a few things to improve the speed ...

* Tested at 27k.

* Disabled file indexing (I don't care about fast searching), took a little while as it chnages the attributes of every file! Now 20k, oh dear.

* Defragged and scandisk. 20.5k.

* Reinstalled SATA driver in Windows. 20.5k.

* Disabled my firewall just to see. 22.5k (was run straight after the above test, not from afresh bootup).

* Left all apps and TSR type stuff running and just benchamrked. 20.5k.

* Reinstalled the latest nvidia nf2 drivers (v2.45). 20k.

* Looked at the Abit NF7-S v2.0 link for drivers but they were from February which didn't instill confidence, esp since Ultra400 weren't even produced then IIRC.

* Tried Maxtor's Acoustic Managment sw but was pointless (as I suspected) due to it being designed for traditional ATA drives.

(Sorry to throw this in, will delete if requested)

[Spritzup]

Hey no worries, I'm thinking of getting the same set-up you have so I'd like to see a resolution to your problem as well.

[catcando]

My WDs are very noisy. They work fine, but oh so noisy. I will get Maxtors next time.

[Nemeliza]

My 2 WDs dont make a peep.

Both 30gig, 7200rpm (WDC WD300BB-32AUA1)

Cant say iv ever heard my Diamondmax's talk to me either.