IBM 60GXP goes crazy on HDTACH

[Guest]

I just got my first 60GXP drive as a replacement for a 75GXP. One of the first things I did was benchmark it using HDTACH. It displayed one of the craziest waveforms that I have ever seen with hdtach. The waveform swings wildly from 41K down to 19K then back up to 41 or thereabouts dozens of times. It occasionally produces some plateaus around 41k as well. I know this is abnormal when compared with my 75GXP which closer resembles a straight horizontal line with a very slight ripple around 35k. When I repeat the benchmark, the results appear random. No consistent peaks or valleys versus disk position. I am running this drive on an ASUS A7V133 mb (no more raid for me thank you very much!) and have tried different promise drivers (build 25 & 33). The results are consistently crazy. I talked with IBM tech supp and they thought that waveform was very abnormal... and are willing to exchange the drive. The only problem is that the replacement drive could act the same way. I have also run Sandra HD benchmarks and the 60GXP comes in around 21k while the 75GXP produces about 24k. The drive seems to work just fine. Any ideas why the benchmarks are so weird??? Please advise.

 

[silverpig]

What did you do when you replaced it? Is windows installed on this new drive?

Lyrics. Wasted time between solos.

 

[Guest]

installed drive, connected to ata100 channel - only drive on this channel. fdisk - 1 partition, full size; then format. performed disk to disk image from existing 75gxp drive in the other ata100 channel. yes, running win98 with minimal apps loaded. about 3.5g used so far. defragged with windows utility and nortons... no difference. swapped ata channels and no difference. the 60gxp still seems to work ok, although kinda sluggish during big disk operations like office installation.

 

[silverpig]

If you just imaged it, then perhaps windows still thinks it's a 75GXP and hasn't done any new setup on it. If you still have your 75GXP, try running that as your primary, reformatting your 60GXP, installing it as a secondary hard disk and then benchmarking it. If it runs well, then that's probably your problem.

You may also just simply have something running in the background that is accessing the disk. Make sure you don't.

Lyrics. Wasted time between solos.

 

[Guest]

thanks for the feedback. actually, i did benchmark the 60gxp as the secondary drive right after formatting. i ignored the weird results at the time thinking that once i had data on the drive it would clean up. wrong.

i talked with ibm again today and they are still scratching their collective head. anyway, they want me to return it and try again with a new one. oh well...

 

[Treppiede]

Hi guys,
me too, I am a lucky owner of a 60GXP....
and I am curious about this issue that you had, Jugdish.
I do have an older version of HDTACH, but I don't even know in which cd I burned it.... (ah... nice old floppies)
If you let me know where I can download a demo or free trial or whatever (updated) I will be more than happy to run the benchmark on mine and let you know, so we can compare...
just let me know man

A television may insult your intelligence but nothing rubs it in
like a computer.

 

[Treppiede]

does anybody know where I can get a demo/shareware/trial/freeware cersion of HDTach?
thnx guys...

Treppiede

A television may insult your intelligence but nothing rubs it in
like a computer.