If you have a Hitachi hard drive, listen up. Apparently the manufacturer sets their hard drives to run at 1.5Gb/s by default and you must download and run the Hitachi HD Tool in order to bump that up to 3Gb/s which is its highest speed setting. This explains why my Hitachi drive is so slow at most times.



Unfortunately, for people like me, you must burn the disc image in order to run the program since the software was written in 16-bit for DOS, which is a nuisance for people who just wants to fix one setting. Unfortunately, the programmers at Hitachi never made a Windows application for it so we don't need to reboot our systems in order to change this setting which shouldn't need to be changed. It should've been automatic; as in the system detects it by itself.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/down...htm#FeatureTool

xboxrulz

Well, 1.5Gb/s is actually more than enough in the first place, which is equal to about 150MB/s. Only in sequential transfer can the hard drive hit that tip. Anyway, that mostly happen only during the transition period from SATA-1 to SATA-2. It's because of motherboard compatibility issue that they made it default to SATA-1 which is 1.5Gb/s. Later version of the hard drive are default to SATA-2. And most of the hard drive I've seen here has a jumper to set it. So, it doesn't need to be set using Hitachi HD Tool. My guess is that the one that you mentioned might have been specific model which they produce when SATA-2 was first implemented.

I guess so too, but I just bought a new Seagate drive and it's even worse. Not only is it defaulted to 1.5Gb/s, it's jumper is so hard to remove, I was just like screw it and kept the jumper on the drive. Like Seagate should have made it a lot easier. Luckily, this drive is for data storage only and is not my software drive.

Plus, I guess running it at a slower speed is good since I want it to last long. Hence, me buying a Enterprise-Grade.

xboxrulz

Running slow is good, but running at SATA-1 isn't going to make any difference. Since that setting is solely used for interface speed + protocol only, it won't make your hard drive last any long than it should have. That option was to make the hard drive compatible with older version of motherboard which cannot negotiate it's interface speed properly when connected to SATA-2 devices. Setting to SATA-1 also doesn't make you drive's platter spin any slower. The platter RPM has to be constant for it to work properly. Thus, the main killer is actually the drive bearings and the read/write head.

That's true. Oh well, I have hard drives that still work since the mid 90s lol. I don't expect any of my drives to fail anytime soon.

xboxrulz

Good for your. Most of my hard drive dies after 5 years. There's one almost 8 I guess, but that one I seldom turn it on. Anyway, most of my hard drive runs 24x7

Unlike you, my systems turn off every night unless they are busy executing a software that needs a lot of time to complete. Else, I keep them off, so it won't spin.

It's a waste of electricity if I leave them on doing nothing.

xboxrulz

I have Hard drives which also work since 1996-1998, 4 GB and 6 GB hard drives, a Seagate and samsung or another Seagate, I'm to lazy to go and look, but they work even though they did a lot in those years.. Hard drives has default time when they "die" by running time and turning them off and on again, but I guess if your computer, everything motherboard and etc. are equipped very well when they can live a happy lifetime I can't remember a hard drive which broke, only one when a lightning stroke at my brothers house and burned the computer, because of electricity, but I can't remember if the HDD died, but I really know that the motherboard was kaput