Re: IDE Harddrive Performance

Wayne Whitney
2001-12-23T17:55:34Z

Jim and Adam,

I recommend that you check out the smartsuite package described in
http://www.linux-ide.org/smart.html. It showed me that when a Maxtor
drive I recently purchased dropped from 40MB/sec to 1MB/sec throughput, it
was having an incredible number of "Hardware ECC Recovered" (SMART
attribute 195) events. I guess some bit chunk of the magnetic media had
failed, in a way that still allowed the drive to recover all the data, but
so that the overhead of the requisite ECC was killing the throughput. I
ended up returning it for a replacement.

Cheers, Wayne