syntaxerror74
September 27th, 2015, 09:53 AM
Well, guys, sometimes there are these happy events in life, when you pay a minor sum, and get 10 times as much, just due to your basic knowledge of things...
To begin with, there was an eBay auction not long ago, where somebody sold a couple of HDDs (1TB each) as "For parts or not working" for a less than moderate price. He wrote in the description, that BIOS/UEFI does recognize all drives properly, and that there are neither any bad nor reallocated sectors on the drive (true, telling from SMART). He continued that he bought these himself almost new and he would only sell these drives because he was not satisfied with their abnormally poor speed (all drives had identical model).
He was sure that there must be a very specific defect in all of these drives which causes the slowdown.
Since I knew from basic knowledge, that a good SMART result will not affect the speed / throughput in any way, I bought the lot...and I'm telling you, this was a WINNER!!!
One drive was supposed to get an NTFS partition (to be able to access it in multiple OSes) and I started making an unformatted partition in gparted and used mkntfs to properly "deep"-format the drive. (I always do that with sensitive data)
Well, but this took plenty of time. After 12 hours, mkntfs was at about 65%. I quit this, and when I did a hdparm -I /dev/sdb, my eyeballs almost fell out:
# hdparm -I /dev/sdb
...
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
Er...gimme a break!!!
*ALL* of these seemingly "slow" drives had write-caching set to DISABLED!!
ROFLMAO...:D :D
(Must be a doggone hard thing to do trying to drive a mere 50 mph with the brakes on, heh...)
As I had better results with sdparm in making settings permanent, I hacked in the following:
# sdparm --set=WDC /dev/sdc
Incredibly enough, formatting the partition now completed in a few freakin' hours!!
So as you can see, lack of knowledge can easily lead to a totally ridiculous conclusion ("HDD is so painfully slow!").
Nevertheless: for me it was a great bargain ... and a great laugh.
To begin with, there was an eBay auction not long ago, where somebody sold a couple of HDDs (1TB each) as "For parts or not working" for a less than moderate price. He wrote in the description, that BIOS/UEFI does recognize all drives properly, and that there are neither any bad nor reallocated sectors on the drive (true, telling from SMART). He continued that he bought these himself almost new and he would only sell these drives because he was not satisfied with their abnormally poor speed (all drives had identical model).
He was sure that there must be a very specific defect in all of these drives which causes the slowdown.
Since I knew from basic knowledge, that a good SMART result will not affect the speed / throughput in any way, I bought the lot...and I'm telling you, this was a WINNER!!!
One drive was supposed to get an NTFS partition (to be able to access it in multiple OSes) and I started making an unformatted partition in gparted and used mkntfs to properly "deep"-format the drive. (I always do that with sensitive data)
Well, but this took plenty of time. After 12 hours, mkntfs was at about 65%. I quit this, and when I did a hdparm -I /dev/sdb, my eyeballs almost fell out:
# hdparm -I /dev/sdb
...
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
Er...gimme a break!!!
*ALL* of these seemingly "slow" drives had write-caching set to DISABLED!!
ROFLMAO...:D :D
(Must be a doggone hard thing to do trying to drive a mere 50 mph with the brakes on, heh...)
As I had better results with sdparm in making settings permanent, I hacked in the following:
# sdparm --set=WDC /dev/sdc
Incredibly enough, formatting the partition now completed in a few freakin' hours!!
So as you can see, lack of knowledge can easily lead to a totally ridiculous conclusion ("HDD is so painfully slow!").
Nevertheless: for me it was a great bargain ... and a great laugh.