What could be causing these terrible hard drive benchmarks

[alandalf]

Here are my computer specs:
i7 920 @ 4ghz
6gb 1600mhz ram
nVidia GTX 285
Asus P6TD Deluxe
2 x OCZ vertex 30GB in RAID 0
2 x 500gb 7200 HDD

I have had OSX installed (hackintosh) on my computer for a few months but I decided I wanted to do some gaming so I bought a brand new Seagate 320gb 7200 RMP HDD off ebay to install Windows 7 on. So I installed windows and my games work pretty well although the hard drive is really slow. The benchmarks using PassMark are:
Sequential read: 68mb/s
Seq write: 43mb/s
Random Seek + RW: 2.6mb/s

It takes ages to load Windows and to load the games. What could be causing this slow speed apart from a faulty drive? Will the SATA port on my montherboard make a difference (i.e. will SATA port 1 be faster than port 6?). Could the drive be under powered? Do I need to defrag? (the drive is about 50% full). Could the cable be faulty?

Thanks for your help

 

[sminlal]

What's the model number of the drive? I'm not that familiar with Seagate drives, but at only 320GB capacity it may be using older-generation platters that aren't very dense, and 68MByte/sec may be normal as an average transfer rate for it.

 

[alandalf]

What's the model number of the drive? I'm not that familiar with Seagate drives, but at only 320GB capacity it may be using older-generation platters that aren't very dense, and 68MByte/sec may be normal as an average transfer rate for it.

Its is ST3320820AS which I believe is an older drive as I have the ST35 also.

 

[sminlal]

I managed to find the following screen on the web - it shows the HDTune performance for your drive. Looks like 68MByte/sec is about right as an average transfer rate for this drive.

If performance is a concern you're better off getting the newer drives with high-density platters. Even if you don't use all the space the drive will still operate faster - in fact some people deliberately buy a large drive and then partition it down so that only the fastest, outermost cylinders get used.