Apology to anyone who bought the 20g HD's from Dell for $55.00

[Richard Cranium]

Update, the drives seem to react well with the IWill Side66 controller, speeds upwards of 33k are seen but the drops are unnerving, all the way to 4k

More testing before I can be sure these drives are good or bad.

Soon to hook up 2 drives in RAID O for speed testing, the first was just using ONE drive and the controller as a ATA/66 IDE interface.

Anyone wanting the speed utility, E-Mail me, I cannot send it through TechIMO's e-mail as there is no provision for attachments.

[MaxVal]

Doc;

I purchased a pair of 60GB 7,200RPM drives from Dell. They turned out to be IBM GXP 60's.
HD Tach indicated much longer seek times than expected.
I downloaded and ran the IBM disk utilities and discovered that the drives were shipped with acoustic management turned on and at maximum (they are extremely quiet).
Disabling the acoustic management brought the seek times from 12ms to 8.5ms!
It's quite possible that the WD's and Maxtors Dell sells are similarly configured.
MAX

[Richard Cranium]

Thanks, didn't consider that possibility.. Will check.
Doc