HDD Pain - HD103UJ Spinpoint F1

[redsun]

I have recently bought HD103UJ Spinpoint F1.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/ ... del_cd=249

This HDD is giving me me a lot of problems.

When i initially installed XP Pro x64 it was flying. However after installing all of the drivers that came with my mobo (P5Q Pro) it became unbelievably slow. What i mean is , when i boot up the PC it takes maybe 2-3 min`s for me to get to Windows from boot (the initial boot when i installed WIN XP WAS 5-7 secs;) also at the same time (while booting into Windows), when you look at the PROGRESS BAR under the windows logo it freezes probably 4-5 times on a constant interval of 9 secs, then completely stops and moves again.

Another issue is when i am in windows, the HDD constantly seeks every 6 seconds (it creates the same type of noise when you do heavy search or stress your HDD)

Lastly i have attached some analysis and photos in a hope that you HDD gurus will be able to help me out

The photo album is here (has 9 pics):
http://s423.photobucket.com/albums/pp315/redsun11/HDD/

Now the question is, is the HDD on its way to heaven, should i do RMA?

cheers,
redsun

[redsun]

>> SATA configuration: "Enhanced"
>> Configure SATA as: "IDE"
(options are: IDE, RAID, AHCI)I have one HDD so far
>> Hard Disk Write Protect: "Disabled"
>> IDE detect time out:"35"




system summary:
e8400
P5Q pro
4 GB gskill 8500
520 w corsair
xp pro x64
9800 gtx+ 512
p182

[larsolsen]

Not sure what's wrong, but if want to see what keeps accesing your disc then this is a good tool: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96645.aspx

[redsun]

i dont know much of hard drives....

do the photos included above are characteristic of a normal hard drive?

[whiic]

The first photo of transfer rate graph sure looks abnormal if it was due to HDD itself. However, since you benchmarked the OS drive whilst running the OS, the frequent drops from ~100MB/s speed to 3MB/s could have been due to indexing or some other HDD intensive tasks performed by OS.

If you want a more accurate graph, you could install the HDD to a system where you run your OS from another HDD. Also verify that indexing, system recovery points, pagefile, etc. are disabled on the drive you are testing.

Or the most certain way, run benchmarks from DOS environment. MHDD is quite capable but it's not very graphic, doesn't give you nice graphs, and since it's in DOS, doesn't allow you to make screencaps.

Small dips in sequential read performance are normal. Adaptive formatting + spare sector clusters spread over platter surface usually causes periodic dips in speed. They should, however not be down to 3MB/s! Such dips would more likely be caused by bad sectors (which don't show up in your SMART attribute screencaps) or HDD-heavy background processes of OS. Controller/driver issue could cause some oddities as well but the performance would probably become predictably poor instead of varying between 100 and 3. And it would probably leave errors in Windows' Event Viewer which can be found under
Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Event Viewer
or
Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer.

I prefer the first, even though it's one click further. There's lots of useful tools in Computer Management so make a desktop shortcut for it. (Disk Management, Device Manager and Event Viewer being the most important tools that are found there.)