Fastest 1TB Drive on the market not so fast....

[Username2324]

So I recently purchased a 1TB Western Digital Caviar drive (32MB, 7,200RPM), supposedly one of the fastest 1TB drives you can buy with all kinds of cool tech for performance boosting!

However, I immediately noticed the drive is much slower than my old 500GB Western Digital Caviar (16MB, 7,200RPM) drive. I even went into the BIOS and switch from quiet operating to performance mode in the drive settings and it's STILL slower than my 500GB. I've defragmented the drive, reduced the start up tasks, everything I can think of and it's STILL slow.

It takes close to 5 minutes just for the thing to get past the Windows XP startup screen, and once I type in my password it's another 5 minutes til I can actually start using the computer. Once using the computer I cannot run more than 2 or 3 programs at a time without the computer 'skipping' and momentarily freezing. And as of late I have been getting a Blue Screen error almost on a daily basis (forgive me I cannot remember the code of it).

Are these signs that I got a bad drive? Or perhaps just a faulty windows installation? (it's been slow from day one)

Anyways, I am currently transferring my 400 some odd GB of data back to my 500GB harddrive and will attempt to reinstall Windows on the TB drive to see if that helps (Which takes DAYS over 3 hours for just 20GB of data).

Are there any tools I can download to monitor hard drive activity? Or a hard drive testing program?

 

[Username2324]

The Blue Screen thing is:
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
0X0000000A (0X000000X8, 0X00000002, 0X00000001, 0X806E6A16)

 

[typerazor]

i would do a fresh install and report back, or try to fix errors using windows option and if that doesnt help, fresh install...

 

[nick2253]

I have had similar problems with many drives that I have installed Windows on. It seems that, as far as my luck goes, Windows doesn't play happily on a brand new drive. To remedy that, I use a drive wipe tool, running over night (and if it has problems, you know that it is a bad drive), and then, the next day, I install Windows. Every time I've had a "first install problem", the drive wipe thing fixes it.

Also, make sure it isn't a program that just deletes partitions or whatnot. It needs to be a wipe that rights over every single sector.

Nick

 

[Guest]

wow 5min to get to the windows log in screen and many minutes after that to load up windows. That's super "slow". Even my laptop with an old ide Hard drive can beat that )
Have you try seagate. I have seagate 500gb 32mb on my desktop and it boot up everything for less than 2 minutes (even with starup registry scan, raid 1 mirror 2 HD, norton antivirus and zone alarm firewall, etc.) I also have a quad core extreme cpu with 6gb ram running 64bit windows vista. May be all that make a big different.

 

[Canuck1]

Can I ask what you are wanting to do with it? Why not use it for a storage drive?

I know not everyone has tons of data but I will suggest you use a smaller drive for the OS and then you have tons of space for any data you collect.

Have you formatted the drive using a decent utility? I suggest System Rescue CD. Also, do you have the HDD using SATA AHCI mode in the BIOS? I find it makes disk drive issues much easier to work with. IDE emulation mode is just a pain, imho. Also, you need it in the SATA mode if you want to use the more advanced modes available. Or it will default to the slower mode, I think.

 

[noobsRus]

Wow you are a noob cake. 1TB drive isn't used for booting an O/S on and storing 400 GB on it the same time. Why do you think they still make 80gb and 120 gb drives.. Don't go partioning it either unless you want to loose performance. Ideal setup is 2x 80Gb or 2x120 Gb Raided 0 for your boot drive. Don't raid any Tb drives unless your doing Raid 10 or 5 for redundancy.