HD Tune Spikes? Normal?

Muel · 15 Jul 2010 at 17:42

Hey, I have two Samsung F3 1TB hard drives. (No raid or anything, it's all witchcraft to me, and they're full of stuff so I can't set raid up anyway as far as I know).

I just ran HD Tune (free version) to see whats what, and they're both spiking in the result, which I haven't seen on any images of this bench on this HDD?

HD One is my OS drive, and it partitioned with 120gb for windows and the rest for docs.

HD Two is just purely for video, and only has one partition taking up the full HDD.

Is it alright for them to spike like this? I'm using a Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H motherboard, they're connected to the SATA3 ports but with SATA3 support disabled, (trying to find the source of some lockups I've been having).

If correct, what these do show is that the promise of an 8.9ms access time is a total lie, unless seek time and access time are two totally different things and I'm getting confused?

Cheers guys.

Muel · 16 Jul 2010 at 08:38

Blimey no replies yet guys? That's not normal, usually there's someone to comment virtually straight away.

spirits247 · 17 Jul 2010 at 11:56

Hi Muel, got linked here from your 5830 thread.

It looks like a program is accessing your hard drives at set periodic intervals and disturbing the scan.

To find out what it is, use a program like Filemon which has now been integrated into Process Monitor: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

Muel · 17 Jul 2010 at 17:04

Cheers dude, seems plausible. I've spotted two accessing fairly regular that it could be. Dropbox, and the Search Indexing thing. There's nothing wrong with them running as they should be though, so the scan results are as they should be IMO. If I stop them, it won't give an acurate reading of my everyday speeds anyway.

In real world tests like moving large amounts of video from one to the other, it always gets speeds of over 100mbps, so it'll be reet I guess.

spirits247 · 17 Jul 2010 at 17:35

The access times look about right too - they are usually between 13-16ms. Hard drives can have different noise profile settings as well - bigger access times means quieter seek noise and it used to be changable via tools.

Seek time they quote is something different I'm sure - I think it's access time minus the latency delay, which is about 4-5ms for a 7200 drive.

EDIT: explaines it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_time