320 G to 500 G upgrade is not what I expected

[par_49]

Windows XP attempted upgrade:

1) clone existing 320 Gb drive onto a 500 Gb drive using Acronis
both old drive and new drive are Hitachi 5400 RPM SATA notebook drives
2) install 500 Gb into computer and reboot
3) all seems to be OK but Diskbench reveals that i/o to new drive is about a factor of 8 slower than the old drive, from 20MB/s to about 3 MB/s.

If you are use to a fast computer, then the speed reduction is mostly unbearable. CPU still is fast as indicated by superPi times that are identical before/after disk swap.

I've searched and tried about everything I can find on the net to solve the problem but to no avail.

What is wrong! I've gone back to the old 320 G drive.

 

[abekl]

You made a mistake by buying a notebook HDD for a home PC. You should have bought a 7200 rpm sata II or sata III hdd.

 

[unksol]

he didnt say it was a home PC. we can safely assume its a notebook. reformat the 500 GB and try the read test when it doesn't have the cloned OS on it to see if its a problem with the drive or with the way you cloned it.

20Mb/s is also really low for the original drive. was it slower while using it? or just in the benchmark. benchmarks may mistakes

 

[par_49]

I never said it was a PC, but I did say notebook drive so I assumed all would understand it was a laptop (IBM thinkpad T61).

OK, I tried to test the drive as an external device using a dedicated SATA driver. Result was the same as when it was used as the boot (internal) drive, 3 MB/s.

Can I now safely assume the drive is bad? Or is there some way to get it faster? I've done this cloning may times in the past (3 previous laptops over the years) and it always resulted in an upgrade and not a downgrade.

I'm not adverse to investing in a much better drive (say a Seagate Momentus XT) but I am afraid that I could have the same problem (poor i/o transfer) unless I understand and fix what is the present problem.

That was my first point and I am very grateful for the replies and help.

 

[geekapproved]

You made a mistake by buying a notebook HDD for a home PC. You should have bought a 7200 rpm sata II or sata III hdd.

ROFL

The problem is the clone obviously, do a fresh install.

 

[abekl]

Whoops. Clearly, I read something into that post that was mistaken.

 

[par_49]

I did some more research and reformatted the drive with a new partition and tried Diskbench once again: result was 44GB/s.

So it seems that the cloning process is the problem and not the drive.

Is there a better cloning program (preferably 'free') then acronis out there. I have used acronis for years.

 

[ram1009]

I recently used a "transfer kit" made by a company called APRICORN. It consists of a proprietary dongle (USB to SATA) and some software. It worked perfectly for me although I did not run the tests you ran to confirm throughput. It's available on Newegg for around $30.

 

[azecly]

Try ease to do backup. i had clone my new hardisk using this software and win 7 startup plus everything else run just as fast as old hardisk. Hope this would help.

 

[CaedenV]

Try Acronis again, I have had a problem occasionally and just redoing the process sometimes fixes it. Also make sure your sector sizes are where you want them. 20MB/s is pretty slow for the original drive. Even the new drive should be at 50+MB/s for sequential reads and writes. And to think I am frustrated with 120-150MB/s on my system drive lol, but I guess that's the difference between laptops and desktops.

 

[par_49]

OK, I re-cloned using the latest download from acronis.

Diskbench results are very puzzling:

C drive was about 8 MB/s

but

D drive was a whopping 50 MB/s

what the heck is going on; these are just partitions on the same disk!

overall, I probably run as is since all my data is on D and I do a lot of data analysis in my profession so I can live with a slower C and a relatively fast D.

but I still would like to 'fix' this problen