PC still running... eh?

[Gurm]

Ok so I ghosted everything over to the WD drive temporarily.

Now, BEFORE I ghosted it, the WD was running as slave... and getting 30MB/sec. sustained (conservative numbers).

Now, it's the boot drive, and getting 25MB/sec. sustained. Still a lot faster than the Seagate, but definitely substantially slower! It's not FULL, it only has 50GB on it. Is this some function of a half-full drive? Or is the data that badly fragmented?

- Gurm

[KvHagedorn]

Prob. the search logic or some such. If 99% of drive is empty, there isn't far to look for the data. The fuller it gets, the more written area it needs to look at to obtain the piece to be read.

[rugger]

Are you still using sandra to benchmark your hard drives?

If you are, your going to have problems, because sandra's hard drive benchmark is woefully inaccurate. (and thats the nice description of it)

[a_h]

Regarding fragmentation a quick format is the same as formating the whole drive. Only difference is that during the whole disk format bad sectors get marked as such, but every modern hdd does this on the fly today too.

You can try the DTemp prog (http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/), it shows you the drives SMART attributes and their thresholds, maybe worth a look.

[Gurm]

Yikes. I just downloaded DTemp, and the temperature on the Seagate is 49'C!

That's critical, according to DTemp. The Samsung is only 37'C! Ouch!

- Gurm, now looking to get a new drive...

[Admiral]

My 36GB Raptor's was doing only 35'C idle
41'C after a full system scan with NAV 2003.

Ambient temperature around 25'C, case about the same. No aditional cooling on the drive, only three out of five 80mm fans (2 back, 1 side - all exhaust) mounted on my Antec PlusView 1000AMG case.

[Technoid]

I have a 120mm fan at 5v cooling my 2 drives