Upgraded HD, New Drive is Slower than Old!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark & Mary Ann Weiss
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Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

I just replaced my old Maxtor 5T020H2 with a new, 7200rpm 6Y120P0 with 8MB
cache.
Naturally, I expected the new drive to be significantly faster than the old
one.
To my surprise, the new drive is only about HALF as fast as the old drive.

nBench shows the old drive doing 58.49 MB/sec, while the new drive is only
doing 26.19MB/sec.

Frankly, I thought the new drive with 8MB of cache RAM would fly--or at
least beat the older drive by a nice margin. In all past instances where I
replaced a drive, the newer drive's raw throughput always surpassed the one
it replaced by 30-40%. I usually assumed that was due to higher areal
density.

What's with the Maxto 120GB drive then? It should have a much higher areal
density than the old 20GB drive it replaces and being effectively empty,
should perform a lot faster than the old, 95% full drive. I have the old
drive on a separate controller as a spare and can readily compare
performance.

Part of the reason I upgraded was to speed up the disk subsystem, but this
is effectively a downgrade.

Although I doubt it, I do wonder if something about using Norton Ghost 2003
to clone the old drive to the new has caused a shift in performance?

Do I have a defective drive? I have never heard of a new drive, with a much
larger cache, performing much more slowly than an old drive with a small
cache. Any thoughts on this?
--
Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

VIDEO PRODUCTION . FILM SCANNING . AUDIO RESTORATION
Hear my Kurzweil Creations at: http://www.dv-clips.com/theater.htm
Business sites at:
www.dv-clips.com
www.mwcomms.com
www.adventuresinanimemusic.com
-
 
This is strange....

Even though I moved my NEW drive into the 1st IDE controller, and BIOS says
that controller/drive is the FIRST boot device, I seem to have the new drive
appearing as G-N letters, not C-F. So I thought I was benching my NEW drive
when in fact I was benching the OLD drive.

But the problem I have now is that my NEW drive doesn't seem to be the boot
drive. My new drive's C: partition is letter G:. The old drive, despite
being moved to the secondary controller, has remained the PRIMARY drive to
Windows 2000. So now I've got a problem.... I'm not sure why this happened.
It's as if Windows marked the drive somehow, so that the cloned drive took
second priority in the letter allocation.

I wonder what's the best way to fix this. I don't want to start changing C:
drive letters around because changing the letter that the OS is on results
in system lockout (had that happen once before and it required a remote
console to reconfigure and I don't remember how I even did it as that was a
one-time situation 3 years ago).

I will try removing the drive letters and manually reassigning them. But
this should not have happened. I don't want to FDISK the old drive until I
see how the new drive is holding up.


--
Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

VIDEO PRODUCTION . FILM SCANNING . AUDIO RESTORATION
Hear my Kurzweil Creations at: http://www.dv-clips.com/theater.htm
Business sites at:
www.dv-clips.com
www.mwcomms.com
www.adventuresinanimemusic.com
-
 
Just tried to change the drive letters around so my new drive would be
C,D,E,F. but could not change G: to C: because it was apparently the boot
drive somehow!

So I changed everything else and rebooted, but cannot boot now--I'm stuck in
a loop of

"Your system has no paging file"
followed by:
"An error occured while connecting to... <network drive>"

And round and round it goes. Can't boot.

Going to reclone the drive and disconnect the old one before booting.
Something on the old drive seems to take over the system's drive letters,
rather than accepting the last drive letters.

--

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

Business sites at:
www.dv-clips.com < NOW ONLINE!
www.mwcomms.com
www.adventuresinanimemusic.com < NEW Streaming Archives!
-
\
 
Mark & Mary Ann Weiss said:
This is strange....

Even though I moved my NEW drive into the 1st IDE controller, and BIOS says
that controller/drive is the FIRST boot device, I seem to have the new drive
appearing as G-N letters, not C-F. So I thought I was benching my NEW drive
when in fact I was benching the OLD drive.

But the problem I have now is that my NEW drive doesn't seem to be the boot
drive. My new drive's C: partition is letter G:. The old drive, despite
being moved to the secondary controller, has remained the PRIMARY drive to
Windows 2000. So now I've got a problem.... I'm not sure why this happened.
It's as if Windows marked the drive somehow, so that the cloned drive took
second priority in the letter allocation.

I wonder what's the best way to fix this. I don't want to start changing C:
drive letters around because changing the letter that the OS is on results
in system lockout (had that happen once before and it required a remote
console to reconfigure and I don't remember how I even did it as that was a
one-time situation 3 years ago).

I will try removing the drive letters and manually reassigning them. But
this should not have happened. I don't want to FDISK the old drive until I
see how the new drive is holding up.


--
Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

VIDEO PRODUCTION . FILM SCANNING . AUDIO RESTORATION
Hear my Kurzweil Creations at: http://www.dv-clips.com/theater.htm
Business sites at:
www.dv-clips.com
www.mwcomms.com
www.adventuresinanimemusic.com
-
Click to expand...

Your Win2000 installation is probably cooked. When
Win2000 detects two installations of itself on different
drives, one being a clone of the other, then it shuffles
the drive letters about in quite unexpected ways. I've
seen this before and I was unable to restore the letters
to what they should be. Your best bet would be to fall
back to the image fille you made of the original disk,
apply it to the new disk, then run the PC with the new
disk only (i.e. NOT with both disks installed).
 
I recloned my old drive to the new drive.
I removed the old drive from the system and booted from the new drive.
All was well.

Then I put the old drive back in.

Booted to DOS via floppy. Tried to FDISK the old drive to remove partitions.
FDISK could not remove the partitions on the old drive.
I then downloaded Maxtor Maxblast 3.
I used MaxBlast to setup the old drive with three partitions. Funny thing
was it was saying that my NEW drive was not setup, but I negated it's
attempt to set that drive up.

I setup the old drive and and rebooted.

"NO ACTIVE PARTITION"
"NO OS FOUND"

What???!!

MaxBlast automatically wiped out the drive I told it to leave alone!!!!

Shit! I'm ****ed! Both my backups of all my business data are now gone!

I had a working 120MB drive with a bootable OS, all my files and drive
letters, and I run MaxBlast and the first thing is does without my
permission is tell me my 120GB drive is not setup and deletes it in a
microsecond! I assumed it was an errant reading and went ahead and formated
my 20GB drive to prevent windows from seeing two copies of itself. But now I
have both drives mysteriously formatted and removed of all partitions. I am
so screwed now!

--

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

Business sites at:
www.dv-clips.com < NOW ONLINE!
www.mwcomms.com
www.adventuresinanimemusic.com < NEW Streaming Archives!
-
 
I restored my C: image and it is NTFS according to drive properties.

I can see all my other drives too. That's a relief.

I am now copying my other drive's data to the old drive.

I am booting from the new drive because its read/write speeds are close to
triple the old drive's speeds--59.59MB/sec on nBench with a 250MB test file.
It trumps my RAID array for speed!

In a few minutes I'll have all data backed up across both drives.

AVOID MaxBlast! That utility should NOT be used on a system that has any
NON-BLANK drives. It wiped my primary partition while it was loading and
initializing itself. That's a crime!

So things are getting back to normal, but I think I blew a blood vessel in
my head.. my head doesn't feel right. I've not been so upset in five years
like this... could not type a straight sentence before.


--

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

Business sites at:
www.dv-clips.com < NOW ONLINE!
www.mwcomms.com
www.adventuresinanimemusic.com < NEW Streaming Archives!
-
 
The last time I tried to clone a Windows XP hard drive, I wound up without a
C drive. I found a simple answer to the problem. I just use a Windows 9x
emergency disk to delete the partition on the new drive before I clone the
old drive to the new. Don't use the Win2k/XP tools to do this.
 
Dennis Langton said:
The last time I tried to clone a Windows XP hard drive, I wound up without a
C drive. I found a simple answer to the problem. I just use a Windows 9x
emergency disk to delete the partition on the new drive before I clone the
old drive to the new. Don't use the Win2k/XP tools to do this.
Click to expand...


I was using FDISK to set up the partitions. The new disk had none. Trouble
was that Windows saw both drives and wanted to make all the partitions on
the old drive the starting point for drive lettering order. I eventually
solved it by removing the old drive after cloning, then FDISKing the old
drive and then recopying as a backup, the data I had just cloned to the new
drive.

All rather wasted though... the 6Y120P0 failed after 168 hours being powered
on. I just installed a Western Digital drive to replace it.


--
Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

VIDEO PRODUCTION . FILM SCANNING . AUDIO RESTORATION
Hear my Kurzweil Creations at: http://www.dv-clips.com/theater.htm
Business sites at:
www.dv-clips.com
www.mwcomms.com
www.adventuresinanimemusic.com
-
 
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