From: swaliff@afterlife.ncsc.mil (Steve Aliff) Subject: Re: Maxtor 7213/HD Timeouts/Disk read doesn't match write?? Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1992 10:32:43 GMT
I re-partitioned my 7213 into one large DOS partition, DOS formatted
it, and ran Norton Utilities' CALIBRAT against it. (No - not a
low-level format - don't panic) I ran 80 patterns against the entire
drive; it took 18 hours and 23 minutes; and no marginal or bad spots
were detected.
Another 7213 owner (Remy Card) reports the same behaviour on his
7213s as I have observed. Furthermore, Remy had the rather clever
idea of running my test program against the device itself
(/dev/hdXXX) rather than against a file on the device. When
performed thusly, no problems were observed. I'll repeat his
experiment myself on my system as soon as I get Linux reloaded.
I had considered returning my drive for a replacement since it's
still under warranty, but now have no reason to believe that a new
drive would fix the problem. If someone familiar with the internals
of Linux would be so kind as to point me at the relevant code, I'll
start analyzing it in the context of my problem. I'm very interested
in opinions of what might be wrong, other things to try, etc.
Because of the price and availability of the 7213, i.e. it's "cheap
and plentiful", it's probably worthwhile for me to explore this
more. If only to finally conclude that the 7213 is not a good choice
for Linux systems (and I certainly hope that's not the conclusion).
-- Steve Aliff (swaliff@afterlife.ncsc.mil [144.51.1.1])