150gb raptor

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hey everyone, had one of the new 150gb raptors for about a month now, and i must admit im not that impressed.
ever since i've got it, my windows xp's load times have really slowed down.
i have done a hdd test and it says its fine, but as the blue bar is going over during boot up, you can hear a clicking noise similar to the one when a hdd starts/stops spinning.
has anyone else suffered this?

i'm thinking of selling it and either goin back to two raptors in raid, or getting a single 16mb cache sata hdd
 
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check the sata cable. my raptor was running really slow once, turned out the cable wasnt making good contact. strange though cos the drive worked fine but would only work at about 30mb/sec. a new cable sorted it out though :)
 
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Either your settings could be wrong somewhere, or the HDD could be on its way out. The Raptor 150GB should give a noticeable increase in speed for just about any scenario when compared to any 7.2krpm drive, and should be plenty fast for booting, loading etc.
 
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Try posting a HDTach test here - should be able to point out any obvious things from that, for starters.

Also, try the WD diagnostics test program to see whether your unit is in full working order.
 
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well theyre connected to the sata ports firmly, just triple checked. runnin wd diag now to find out and will post results.

how much of a difference is there in load times between a normal sata hdd compared to a raptor? do you lot really think its noticeable?
 
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might be some driver issue. that report looks ok to me except i dont know why there are 2 big dips at the start. correct speeds compared to my 74gb drives though.
 
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what kind of driver issue? the only difference between this and my previous raptor install of two 74gbs in raid (which worked perfectly), was that the two 74gbs were on the silicon image raid onboard controller (which required driver installation during windows setup) where as now im using the onboard nForce 4 Controller.
 
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I notice the difference is you are now using the nf4 Sata ports not silicon!
Did you use the NF4 IDE driver? this often causes the slowdown. There are plenty of threads on it if you do a google search.

If you did install the IDE drivers as part of the nforce shipsets then try disabling NCQ within device manager as this caused slowdown with both my maxtor Sata's and Spinpoint Sata's.

Took me a while to sus this out! and really annoyed me as both makes of drives have NCQ but I couldnt use it! (not that it makes any difference to speed in a desk top environment but thats not the point!)


cheers
 
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ninja2000 said:
I notice the difference is you are now using the nf4 Sata ports not silicon!
Did you use the NF4 IDE driver? this often causes the slowdown. There are plenty of threads on it if you do a google search.

If you did install the IDE drivers as part of the nforce shipsets then try disabling NCQ within device manager as this caused slowdown with both my maxtor Sata's and Spinpoint Sata's.

Took me a while to sus this out! and really annoyed me as both makes of drives have NCQ but I couldnt use it! (not that it makes any difference to speed in a desk top environment but thats not the point!)




yeah disable ncq fixed my problems
 
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