new maxtor 80 gig is a real lemon (updated)

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Fri Feb 11, 2005 7:49 pm

*edited*

well, what can i say? time to rant!

- it performs horrible in striping / raid configs with a sil3114 or sil3112 (tried two other brands of harddrives, they worked ok, tried one sil3114 onboard, and one sil3112 on an external pci card, fine with other drives, not with this maxtor type / model)

- the new maxtor... it checks every byte written for the first 'n' attempts / days whatever (no documentation on that to be found, but trust me, it makes optimizing for performance rather a challenge)

- it is SLOWER than its ata counterpart (i got a pata one as well, just for fun i compared it), at best it's equal, but most of the times it lags 1 to 5%

- i already returned my first one (3 days old) as it was showing excessive head movement (probably compensating for bad sectors)...

- it's great these drives are so silent, you now have to pay extra attention to hear them go haywire (okay, i admit, i'm now complaining for the sake of it

)

- 1 year warranty (hey maxtor, make it 1 day, saves even more money)

i wonder if the other brands are any better though

i mean, you need seatbelts for a seagate, not that it's that fast, but you may fall out of your chair when falling asleep... (that slow)

and nvidia, dear nvidia... please enable write caching on the first device connected to your nforce3 chipset by default? why would i want NOT to delay writing? i'm doing striping for heaven's sake!

oh yeah asus... put in a good bios right away, and make that update tool actually work... and how about recent versions on the included cd? oh, yes, i *love* downloading 20+ mb for a single raid driver, and best of all, the download wasn't even complete

and finally microsoft, dear microsoft... why is it so hard to check on startup if the checksums for hardware still match? make the bootup 10 seconds longer in exchange for proper hardware detection, and the change to safely boot if hardware has been changed? change a piece of hardware (harddisk, stripe vs. no stripe, mainboard)... boom... and chances are nt / 2k / xp is dead

and while i'm at it complaining about microsoft, nice idea, f-lock (kill that marketeer who thought this one up!)... try to hit f6 on install on a fast machine... oh damn, f-lock first... try to hit f10 to go into the nvidia raid setup... oh damn, f-lock first... and when going through the xp setup motions it really is a GREAT idea to reset the keyboard... oh damn, hit the f-lock again...

sigh

great, now i have an xp3000 with striping harddisk, cool, now i can crash it even faster... that is, if i can get it to work

Post by **Fred** » Fri Feb 11, 2005 8:14 pm

Good to know..

PB · Post by PB » Sat Feb 12, 2005 12:05 am

For what it's worth I've got an 80 GB Maxtor 6Y080P0 hard drive and it's
performance and reliability have been superb... it's used on a weekly basis
for high-speed DV video capture and hasn't hiccuped once or give any sign
of a problem. I guess with anything you can always end up with a lemon,
but I wouldn't say Maxtor is a "bad' brand or anything. Just my 2 cents.

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Sat Feb 12, 2005 12:14 am

i think it's the newer 6Y080L0 series (the sata versions) that stink

got a few 6Y120P0 drives that work without a hitch

Post by **Berikco** » Sat Feb 12, 2005 9:21 am

Striping on IDE or SATA....aaargh....make sure you backup you're stuff.
I'v seen them fail by the dozen, one bad sector and array is gone.
I use a SCSI RAID 5 array in my server, 6 harddisk 9GB and one spare on a RAID controller, works like a sharm, and never lost any data. (also tape backup of course)
All from recovered stuff that i resqued from going to the trash.

And its lightning fast

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Sat Feb 12, 2005 9:48 am

i was more interested in the actual performance of the beast, and wondered if it would decrease compilation times etc.

conclusion: yes, the actual performance does go up a bit, but not as much as one would expect

these new maxtors do not behave very well

yeah, burst and transfer is marginally higher than their pata brethern, but they are somewhat of a disappointment, especially when doing a copy on the same harddrive... it looks like prolongued continuous head movements slow them down, and that is outright weird

i'm not done playing yet though

Post by **Berikco** » Sat Feb 12, 2005 10:27 am

Buy a Intel SRCU42X controller and a couple of Seagate 15K scsi disks, compiling will be faster

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Sat Feb 12, 2005 2:21 pm

my money will go faster too!

Kale · Post by **Kale** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 2:27 pm

I now swear by Western digital Raptors.

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 5:17 pm

and tadaaaaaa.... the second 80 gig drive died mysteriously... oh well, not enitrely mysteriously, as i didn't trust it that much, i had it run a butterfly test overnight

dead

another one that goes back to the shop

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 7:02 pm

this can't be for real, i told myself, so i investigated a little more... i borrowed another 80 gb maxtor and checked it out...

this is *very* weird... perhaps some other expert can shine their light on it, because i haven't got a clue... i know how to reproduce it, i just don't know why it happes (though i stronly suspect the drives

read on...

1. configuration: asus k8n-e, updated bios and drivers, windows xp, 3 harddisks, hd1 and hd2: maxtor 'lemon' 6Y080L0, hd3: maxtor 6Y120P0, windows xp pro sp2

2. when copying a 'large' amount of data (bunch of 200 mb avi files) from hd3 to hd3 (pata) transfer speed is initially 23 MBps, then slows down to 17 or so MBps, this is quite normal behaviour

3. when copying the same files from hd1 to hd1 OR hd2 to hd2 transfer speed starts at 17 MBps then slows down to 2.3 MBps (!), you can hear the drive heads make additional movements

4. now comes the interesting part: when copying this set of files from hd1 to hd1 AND AT THE SAME TIME copy a similar set ON ANY OTHER DRIVE (ie. hd1 to hd1 or hd2 to hd2) suddenly the speed PICKS UP again

5. it looks like this behaviour only happens when you do a 'disk to disk' copy action on the same sata drive, it does not happen between different drives, it does not happen when simultaneously other actions (even entirely restricted to other drives) take place, it does not happen on pata drives at all

6. i've repeated the above with an asrock mainboard with an xp2500 cpu and a sil 3114 sata controller (so an entirely different hardware setup with only the same sata drives in comon) and it showed the same behaviour

7. so i tried something even more stupid: two copy actions on the same drive at the same time, id. hd1 to hd1 and another hd1 to hd1... one copying thread ran from 2 MBps to 4 MBps, two threads (copying different stuff of similar sizes) at the same time totalled higher 8 to 10 MBps

8. interestingly, this does not happen immediately, but takes a few seconds before drive speed starts slowing down, i wondered if it could be the power supply or something similar, but doing multiple copy actions on multiple drives did not cause this problem, even though that would be using more power

9. this strange behaviour also showed up when doing raid0... writing speed was awfully slow, even though reading speed was all the way up where it should be

10. could it be windows? unlikely, as it doesn't show up on pata... could it be the mainboard / chipset? unlikely, as it shows up on another mainboard / chipset as well... could it be a single bad drive? unlikely, as i've seen it on more than one drive... interference and thus data loss on the cable? unlikely, as two copy actions on the same drive result in a higher net result...

very weird, this, i am tempted to think that the (caching?) logic on board the 6Y060L0 is not up to the job, perhaps some sort of protection logic kicks in too early? i dunno but i can easily reproduce this situation with these drives

i would like to know if other people have similar experience with sata drives, it's easy to test: just copy one directory with many large files to another directory on the same drive

PB · Post by PB » Sun Feb 13, 2005 7:46 pm

> i would like to know if other people have similar experience with sata
> drives, it's easy to test: just copy one directory with many large files to
> another directory on the same drive

I don't know if my Maxtor is a "sata" drive but as I said above I use it for
video transfers every week. I copy files of 13 GB in size (raw DV AVIs)
and 3 GB (converted MPEG2s) to and from it all the time with no problem,
and also from within it to other folders. Maybe I just got lucky? Dunno.
But I've never had any of the problems that you've described. Maybe it's
your motherboard causing an incompatibility somewhere? Do you have
DMA enabled for the drive, and write behind cache enabled/disabled, etc?

Edit: Now that I think of it, I once had a problem with my older hard drive
which was due to a bad IDE cable (which looked physically perfect). Try
another (new!) cable with your drive and see how you go... it definitely
helped my HD problem in the past.

einander · Post by **einander** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 10:28 pm

Hi Bluez:

i would like to know if other people have similar experience with sata drives, it's easy to test: just copy one directory with many large files to another directory on the same drive

I have 2 Sata drives- No Raid: Maxtor 67080M0 -80 GB and Seagate 320082AS -180 GB

Copy 700 MB from Seagate to seagate: 25 sec
Copy the same 700 MB from Maxtor to Maxtor: 40 sec

Copy the same 700 MB at the same time from Maxtor to Maxtor AND from Maxtor to Seagate: 4 min.
No strange noises from Maxtor. It's very quiet.

Bonne_den_kule · Post by **Bonne_den_kule** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 10:47 pm

Go and buy a Western Digital.
I have WD1600Jb with liquid ball-bearing.
Fast and silence

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 11:09 pm

i am seriously considering going out and buying a raptor, or any other sata beast, and returning the two maxtors... if i got the time that's the plan for tomorrow, actually...