[Hx] Hitachi drives and performance testing

[Matt Strange]

To all,

A week or so ago there was a discussion here about Hitachi drives failing in Mac minis. Lo and behold, this week somebody brought in a Mac mini Server that was "acting flaky." It's about 13 months old, so I recalled the Hitachi drive discussion.

To see if the drives were having trouble, I wrote an AppleScript to move a file back and forth repeatedly, noting the time required. Sure enough, writing my test file to the drive that contains the system, applications, etc. took about 50 seconds, while writing to the secondary drive only took about 8 seconds. No wonder the mini was acting sluggish.

Today I'm replacing both drives (one with an SSD) because if one Hitachi drive failed, the other will probably go someday. And these 2010 Mac minis are a pain to work in.

Anyhow, after I was done, I polished the script up and made it fit for public display. If you want it, you can download it from our Free Scripts page: <http://qsatoolworks.com/scripting/scripts/>. Here's how I describe this script on the page:
>

> Duplication Timing Test: This script isn’t really a Helix script; it’s a script that tests the speed of a hard drive in repeatedly copying a file. I wrote this to test whether a hard drive was running slower than it should be (it was) and thought others might find it useful. Run it now to gather baseline data, then later to see if the drive has slowed.

It dawned on me that unless you have something to compare it to, you can't really know whether a drive is running "slow" or not. So if this is of interest to you, my suggestion is to run it on a 'new' machine and save the results so you have baseline figures. Run it every 6 months or so to make sure it is still performing as expected.

Hope this helps,
Matt Strange
Technical Support
QSA ToolWorks, LLC
Support: 570-662-8883
www.qsatoolworks.com

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[Anton Sommer]

Matt,
All I get is: being forwarded to:
http://qsatoolworks.com/scripting/scripts/hrrk_scripts/DuplicationTimingTest
.zip

But the download seemingly does not happen

Rgds
Anton Sommer

Am 29.09.11 20:38 schrieb "Matt Strange" unter <ma...@qsatoolworks.com>:

[Matt Strange]

On Sep 29, 2011, at 2:58 PM, Anton Sommer wrote:

> All I get is: being forwarded to

Thanks for reporting that. the path errors on that page have now been corrected.

[Elton Darby]

On a this line.  My report of this failure was determined/flagged by slow operation, as Matt describes and DiskWarrior.  I assume it was dead, since even after re-formatting and reformatting & zeroing data, which I understand re-maps bad blocks, it still got "hardware errors" when running DiskWarrior.  

However, just before removing & replacing the drive, I reformatted it using the 7-pass option, as I was trying to get the "S.M.A.R.T. status" to fail -- it bugs me it never did.  

Well, the 7-pass must have remapped the bad blocks as I can't get it to fail now.  Since its now a CCC daily clone disk, I've yet to replace it -- no errors since.

--------------------------

Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

On Sep 29, 2011, at 1:38 PM, Matt Strange wrote:

To all,

A week or so ago there was a discussion here about Hitachi drives failing in Mac minis. Lo and behold, this week somebody brought in a Mac mini Server that was "acting flaky." It's about 13 months old, so I recalled the Hitachi drive discussion.

To see if the drives were having trouble, I wrote an AppleScript to move a file back and forth repeatedly, noting the time required. Sure enough, writing my test file to the drive that contains the system, applications, etc. took about 50 seconds, while writing to the secondary drive only took about 8 seconds. No wonder the mini was acting sluggish.

Today I'm replacing both drives (one with an SSD) because if one Hitachi drive failed, the other will probably go someday. And these 2010 Mac minis are a pain to work in.

Anyhow, after I was done, I polished the script up and made it fit for public display. If you want it, you can download it from our Free Scripts page: <http://qsatoolworks.com/scripting/scripts/>. Here's how I describe this script on the page:

Duplication Timing Test: This script isn’t really a Helix script; it’s a script that tests the speed of a hard drive in repeatedly copying a file. I wrote this to test whether a hard drive was running slower than it should be (it was) and thought others might find it useful. Run it now to gather baseline data, then later to see if the drive has slowed.

It dawned on me that unless you have something to compare it to, you can't really know whether a drive is running "slow" or not. So if this is of interest to you, my suggestion is to run it on a 'new' machine and save the results so you have baseline figures. Run it every 6 months or so to make sure it is still performing as expected.

[Lenny Eiger]

If its under warranty I would replace it... if it isn't and you're just using it for backup, then that's fine.

However, in the past I haven't had drives that gave me one failure last for very much longer after that.... no matter how well I thought I had "fixed" it...

Good luck with it.

Lenny