Slow and unreliable SATA drive

[Dave the Funkatron]

Hey all,

I bought myself a nice new Maxtor SATA drive (STM3500630AS), which I
put into my Windows XP box. The SATA drive seems to be running slower
than the old ATA100 drive (also a Maxtor) that is also in there.
Though this is a qualitative observation, as I don't have any
benchmark programs (so if you can recommend a good free benchmark,
that would be nice as well .

The other problem is that I seem to get the odd corrupt file on that
drive, though I can't reproduce this reliably, and scandisk and chkdsk
don't show any bad sectors.

A quick google of the problem tells me that the usual fix is a better
SATA controller/drivers. The controller I have is built into the
motherboard (which is an Asus P5B, if that matters). I've tried
getting the latest updates for that board from Asus's site, though all
I can find are RAID controller updates and some sort of "Storage
manager" from Intel.

The exact OS, if it matters, is Windows XP Pro. I have tried both the
x86 and the x64 versions.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Dave

 

[Paul]

Hey all,

I bought myself a nice new Maxtor SATA drive (STM3500630AS), which I
put into my Windows XP box. The SATA drive seems to be running slower
than the old ATA100 drive (also a Maxtor) that is also in there.
Though this is a qualitative observation, as I don't have any
benchmark programs (so if you can recommend a good free benchmark,
that would be nice as well .

The other problem is that I seem to get the odd corrupt file on that
drive, though I can't reproduce this reliably, and scandisk and chkdsk
don't show any bad sectors.

A quick google of the problem tells me that the usual fix is a better
SATA controller/drivers. The controller I have is built into the
motherboard (which is an Asus P5B, if that matters). I've tried
getting the latest updates for that board from Asus's site, though all
I can find are RAID controller updates and some sort of "Storage
manager" from Intel.

The exact OS, if it matters, is Windows XP Pro. I have tried both the
x86 and the x64 versions.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Dave

Start with some benchmarks. My latest disk manages about 70MB/sec
at the beginning and perhaps 40MB/sec or so at the end. Those are
sustained rates, versus the burst rate which shows what the cable
is capable of. Sustained rates are limited by the media (head) rate.

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach
http://www.hdtune.com

SATA is supposed to auto-negotiate the rate, selecting either
300MB/sec or 150MB/sec for burst. In cases where the hardware
won't play nice, you can use a jumper on the jumper block, to
force the rate to the lower option. Which is still plenty, in
terms of meeting the requirements of the sustained rate.

Paul

 

[sandy58]

Hey all,

I bought myself a nice new Maxtor SATA drive (STM3500630AS), which I
put into my Windows XP box. The SATA drive seems to be running slower
than the old ATA100 drive (also a Maxtor) that is also in there.
Though this is a qualitative observation, as I don't have any
benchmark programs (so if you can recommend a good free benchmark,
that would be nice as well .

The other problem is that I seem to get the odd corrupt file on that
drive, though I can't reproduce this reliably, and scandisk and chkdsk
don't show any bad sectors.

A quick google of the problem tells me that the usual fix is a better
SATA controller/drivers. The controller I have is built into the
motherboard (which is an Asus P5B, if that matters). I've tried
getting the latest updates for that board from Asus's site, though all
I can find are RAID controller updates and some sort of "Storage
manager" from Intel.

The exact OS, if it matters, is Windows XP Pro. I have tried both the
x86 and the x64 versions.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Dave

SiSoftSandra Pro Business XIIc
Let me know if you want it, Dave

 

[AdenOne]

If you have Nero, there is a very simple and good built-in benchmark,
if you select copy CD and then go to image storage -> test disks speed
or something like that.

My Seagate SATA2 drive gets about 77MB\s average of 5 tests, whether
on SATA-150 or 300 mode.

You can also try this: in device manager, right-click your drive and
select properties, and on the policies tab, make sure both tick boxes
are checked, for both write-caching and advanced performance, although
this one might be Vista-specific, I cannot recall.

Also, perhaps a good defrag would help, always do a good defrag after
a clean install of the OS.

 

[John McGaw]

Hey all,

I bought myself a nice new Maxtor SATA drive (STM3500630AS), which I
put into my Windows XP box. The SATA drive seems to be running slower snip...
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Dave

The very first thing I would try is a new high-quality SATA cable,
preferably one with latches. At least half the problems I've had with
SATA drives have been cable related. I just had one that showed up
yesterday which was intermittent in an odd way: burn a DVD at 20X speed
and the system HD would fail over half the time. Burn at 16X and the
errors became less frequent. Burn at 12X (or maybe it was 10X) and the
problems went away completely. No errors ever showed up at other times.
The culprit finally turned out to be the HD's SATA cable which was being
literally rattled by the vibrations from the DVD drive spinning at high
speed.

 

[Dave the Funkatron]

You can also try this: in device manager, right-click your drive and
select properties, and on the policies tab, make sure both tick boxes
are checked, for both write-caching and advanced performance, although
this one might be Vista-specific, I cannot recall.

Ya, that seems to work, though the setting comes with a stern warning
about using it on a drive that does not have a UPS or other power
backup. How concerned should I be about this? Incidently, the old ATA
drive doesn't have this setting checked off, and it is still flying
just fine.

 

[kony]

Ya, that seems to work, though the setting comes with a stern warning
about using it on a drive that does not have a UPS or other power
backup. How concerned should I be about this? Incidently, the old ATA
drive doesn't have this setting checked off, and it is still flying
just fine.

Write caching is generally desirable but only you can know
if you frequently have valuable data waiting to be written
and if the risk of losing that data is significant based on
frequent power outtages.

Generally, if you had this scenario I think you would know
it and should otherwise keep write caching enabled.

 

[Dave the Funkatron]

Write caching is generally desirable but only you can know
if you frequently have valuable data waiting to be written
and if the risk of losing that data is significant based on
frequent power outtages.

Generally, if you had this scenario I think you would know
it and should otherwise keep write caching enabled.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. The setting that made it run
faster was not "write caching", but "advanced performance" underneath
that one. Both my drives have write caching enabled, but only the new
SATA seems to need the advanced one for it to not be laggy and all
that. So why might that be?

 

[DevilsPGD]

In message
<f36cde14-ab1c-4267-820d-df31a5123d16@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com> Dave

Sorry, I should have been more clear. The setting that made it run
faster was not "write caching", but "advanced performance" underneath
that one. Both my drives have write caching enabled, but only the new
SATA seems to need the advanced one for it to not be laggy and all
that. So why might that be?

"Advanced performance" basically turns off some cases where the NTFS
subsystem flushes the disk to ensure that the drive's allocation tables
and journals are written correctly so that recovery of everything other
then user data is virtually guaranteed.

 

[Dave the Funkatron]

In message
<f36cde14-ab1c-4267-820d-df31a5123...@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com> Dave



"Advanced performance" basically turns off some cases where the NTFS
subsystem flushes the disk to ensure that the drive's allocation tables
and journals are written correctly so that recovery of everything other
then user data is virtually guaranteed.

Fair enough. Though there is still something funny going on. My sytem
is still laggy when the disk is in heavy use. Though, I just realized
something: the lag only seems to happen when the SATA drive is in use,
not the old ATA. Which makes me suspect the SATA controller even more.
Can anyone suggest a way to test the controller? Or are there known
issues with certain ones?

Thanks.

Dave

 

[kony]

Fair enough. Though there is still something funny going on. My sytem
is still laggy when the disk is in heavy use. Though, I just realized
something: the lag only seems to happen when the SATA drive is in use,
not the old ATA. Which makes me suspect the SATA controller even more.
Can anyone suggest a way to test the controller? Or are there known
issues with certain ones?

Part of the problem is that you never fully described the
computer setup, or did I overlook it? For example if you
had written that windows was installed to this SATA drive
and accessing it is when there is the lag, it could simply
be fragmented or the system doesn't have sufficient memory
so it's paging out data then reading it back in.

The way to test is to run benchmarks of the drive and note
throughput and % CPU utilization.

 

[Dave the Funkatron]

Part of the problem is that you never fully described the
computer setup, or did I overlook it?  For example if you
had written that windows was installed to this SATA drive
and accessing it is when there is the lag, it could simply
be fragmented or the system doesn't have sufficient memory
so it's paging out data then reading it back in.

The way to test is to run benchmarks of the drive and note
throughput and % CPU utilization.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Damn, I wish it was something simple like that. The OS is on the old
ATA drive. Otherwise, even opening notepad takes a while (well, like 5
seconds). The SATA drive is about 3% fragmentation, and the old ATA is
more like 25% fragged. The benchmarks don't seem to cause the problem,
but I can reproduce it pretty easily by running video clip (mp4) off
of the drive. CPU utilization (on a 2.1GHz Core2Duo) peaks at about
20%. Memory utilization is around 0.4 GB (of 1GB RAM + 1.5GB swap
file).

On the benchmark (HD Tach), I get times of 80-50MB/s on the SATA, and
the old ATA is steady across the drive at 30ish MB/s. The CPU usage on
both peaks out at a whopping 9%.

 

[Dave the Funkatron]

Damn, I wish it was something simple like that. The OS is on the old
ATA drive. Otherwise, even opening notepad takes a while (well, like 5
seconds). The SATA drive is about 3% fragmentation, and the old ATA is
more like 25% fragged. The benchmarks don't seem to cause the problem,
but I can reproduce it pretty easily by running video clip (mp4) off
of the drive. CPU utilization (on a 2.1GHz Core2Duo) peaks at about
20%. Memory utilization is around 0.4 GB (of 1GB RAM + 1.5GB swap
file).

On the benchmark (HD Tach), I get times of 80-50MB/s on the SATA, and
the old ATA is steady across the drive at 30ish MB/s. The CPU usage on
both peaks out at a whopping 9%.

I should mention, I don't think it's a codec thing, because the same
video plays fine on that old ATA drive.

 

[kony]

I should mention, I don't think it's a codec thing, because the same
video plays fine on that old ATA drive.

You might download the Maxtor diagnostics for windows (from
Seagate's website). Think it's called Maxblast 5, about a
100MB download. Funny how everything becomes bloated these
days, it wasn't THAT long ago diagnostics fit on a floppy
disc.