seagate barracuda 7200.11 320Gb random access time

[exodusprime1337]

hey all i've put a few other threads up and i'm sorry but this is starting to piss me off, the dst passes in seatools, my computer feels alright as far as speed but i hate the fact that my random access speeds suck. my drive gets about about 180 average read, never below 120Mb/s as far as benches go, but my drives access time is 20-30ms.... i can't ifnd a reason why. let me detail some of the things i've tried

1. tried single drive separately
2. tried raid striping sizes raning from 16k to 128k
3. tried different raid styles, 0,1,5,
4. tried on a different mobo-albeit the same chipset crosshair and my m2n32(the crosshair with 7200.10 drives get's a 13.6ms so i'm assuming the controller is ok
5. tried different os, windows, linux, xp.
6. tried different windows settings from write caching to ncq and the like... not really to keen on this i don't know much about this stuff here

ok aside from that the one thing i can't do is change the aam settings. apparently in between the 7200.10 and 7200.11 era seagate lost a lawsuit and couldn't include the ability to disable it... to my knowledge it's on full blast but i can't change it... does anybody know how??

also if you own a 7200.11 eve in raid or single mode pop up an hdtach/hd tune for me so i can compare, maybe i'm just paranoid. and if you can just give you opinion let me know what you think of the bench maybe i'm just being retarded about it.

here is my last hdtach run 128k strip raid 0.

 

[timta2]

What kind of access time do you get with a single drive? I used to be able to change the AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) on my old Seagate drive with HDDLife but haven't tried it lately. You might be able to do it with a trial.
http://hddlife.com/eng/whats_new.html

 

[exodusprime1337]

yeah i can't run hddlife cause i'm in raid, but is there any way to change the setting, right now the aam setting i can see in the device manager is 254 i think with i believe is max?? the drive is really really quiet.

 

[exodusprime1337]

could i technically plug a drive into another computer and use winaam while the drive is slaved there to turn down the setting??

 

[timta2]

OK, well maybe that was an older drive I was referring to. In agreement with what you said and from what I have just read there was a patent dispute and Seagate removed the AAM setting from the firmware on later drives. Someone said that later drives (after the lawsuit) were preset to performance AAM mode in the factory.

 

[exodusprime1337]

yeah i'm reading all over the place and seeing other hdtune reviews of teh 320Gb single platter 7200.11 drives and they all look like they've got about the same shit access time. too bad, i guess for me.

i'm getting an ssd for my os for christmas... should i just deal with it... would i see a very noticable performance change with a say 13 or 12ms access time??

 

[timta2]

What firmware version do your drives have?

 

[exodusprime1337]

sd22 is the firmware, i can't find any other firmware revisions on the web??

 

[exodusprime1337]

wait do you have the same drives??

 

[timta2]

No, I have a 7200.10 and I just realized that it has the dreaded AAK firmware I've been looking around and it sounds like there are a lot of problems with the 320 gig drives both 7200.10 and 7200.11

Have you given any thought into trying Seatools to see if any errors pop up or contacting Seagate tech support?

 

[exodusprime1337]

i tried seatools and they actually passed(of course they did lol) i put in a request to seagate through their email asking for another firmware revision. lets see how it works out. if i don't get this fixed by the end of the week it's hello wd drives for me. f*** this i'm tired of it. i've been buying seagate drives since i was like 14 years old and built my first pc, i cant' stand it when a company F**** it's customers like this. 20ms.... !!!!! i mean you shouldn't be able to release a drive with an access time that high lol.

 

[timta2]

I totally agree with you man. I have been a fan of Seagate for years but I'm probably going to go with someone else from now on. I recommended a Seagate to a friend not to long ago and the damn thing died after like 6 months, how does that make me and Seagate look?. I wish you good luck and hope you get some kind of resolution you are happy with.

 

[exodusprime1337]

thanx, just for my knowledge, am i really missing out with the poor access time, i mean my overall bandwidth seems great... will i notice a whole lot??