St3000dm001-9yn166

[Aaron68]

Hi, I have the Seagate STBD3000100 / ST3000DM001-9YN166 hard disk were it seems to be a little slugish from what I can see on the screen. It just does not seem to run as fast as I thought it would.

When I run the Windows 7 Performance Information Tool the hard disk transfer rate runs at 5.9. Is this normal for this drive or should it run faster?

Thanks in advance!
Aaron

 

[fzabkar]

I would suggest that you run a HD Tune read benchmark against the drive.

http://www.hdtune.com/

 

[Aaron68]

I ran HD Tune and below are my results.

Transfer rate:
Min: 127 MB/sec
Max: 209.5 MB/sec
Average: 175.7 MB/sec
Access Time: 11.4ms
Burst Rate: 236.2 MB/sec
CPU Usage: -1.0%

This is a new install on a Asus P8z77-v MB with i7-3770k CPU. I cant understand why the HD runs so slow considering its a 6Gb/s drive at 7200 rpm. Do you think Im missing a setting for driver so some sort? Also, my bios sees the whole 3 gig drive but Windows 7 Home cant see over a 2 gig parition so I have a C and E drive for the HD.

Thanks again..
Aaron

 

[fzabkar]

Your results look OK to me.

See http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/barracuda-ds1737-1-1111us.pdf

6Gb/s is the interface speed. The transfer rate between SDRAM and the platters is much less.

Windows 7 should be able to see the entire drive as a single partition if you use GPT mode. In MBR mode you would be limited to 2TiB. However, a tool such as DiscWizard could allow you to see the remainder of the drive as a second "virtual" physical drive. In fact this appears to be how you have configured it. I say this because the minimum transfer rate would normally be one half of the maximum. In your case it looks like 127 MB/s may represent the transfer rate at the 2TiB point, not 3TB.

 

[Aaron68]

Thanks for all your help fzabkar..

So do you think if I try and setup the drive as a 3 TiB partition it should speed up the transfer rate? Also, not sure how to setup the HD as a GPT partition, I didnt see the option the first time around. Do you have any pointers on this part?

 

[fzabkar]

The transfer rate is already at its optimum level.

Windows 7 should give you a choice of MBR or GPT when initialising the drive.

See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771486.aspx