Fujitsu HDD with very slow access time

Hi to all,

I have been having this slight problem. My HDD is a Fujitsu 6.4 Gb MPC3064. It is partitioned in 3 (3Gb/1.5Gb/1.5Gb). The problem is slow disk access. I measured the access time with Microscope software and the 40X Cd rom drive resulted in 50% faster. Can you beleive it?

I also ran the HDD through the comprehensive test program from Fujitsu. This test the drive for around 45 minutes and pronounced it ok. I then erased the drive (low level format ) with fjerase also from fujitsu.

When I copied the data back (after re partitioning with fdisk) it remained the same. The problem I think is not on the disk surface but actually on the platter motor itself. Can someone shed any light on this? I also borrowed another HDD ( a Quantum and copied all data on it) and this worked fine. Windows 98 booted in 60 seconds (from windows I restarted and noted the time until the red led of HDD access stopped flickering).
When I re-connected the Fujitsu the same test took 183 seconds. 3 minutes. Is this drive slow or what?

Can anyone offer any help? Please?

 

I don't have a difinitive answer for you; but, I will say that there are faster drives and slower drives--and there are drives that have lots of cache and drives that have nearly none. I do know that Fujitsu is one of those companies that makes a lot of ultra-cheap drives.

Check these features:
7200 RPM vs. 5400 RPM
ATA 100 vs. ATA 66 or 33
2 Megs of on-disk cache vs. much less

These factors alone can account for the difference in speed between the Fujitsu and the Quantum. Also, there is the possibility that the logic board has some failed component.

Just my opinion: Fujitsu and Samsung are two brands I will not own unless they happen to fall into my lap with a (free) trade-in. I allow no trade-in value on these brands (sort of like a Yugo).

 

Slow Fujitsu Drive

Thanks Alex for your prompt reply to my query.

The thing that bothers me is that this drive was performing well before. It is o flate that it started behaving like this. As for Fujitsu and Samsung drives being on the cheap side I do not know but one thing I know for sure is that Quantum made some funny drives too, for example the 10.2Gb and 13Gb HDD were a real messy piece of kit.

To quantum's credit I owned a 3.8Gb Fireball for over 4 years and it served me well until I installed a CD-RW and it could not keep up with the writing/deleting of temp files and died!

Thanks anyway