I don't know exactly when it started, but I noticed it when I formatted my other hard drive and reinstalled windows. After Windows booted, I decided to clear the slow hard drive and install linux. Well, copying anything from it took an extended period of time. (Took literally an hour to copy 15gb). Then I used Partition Magic to resize the partition on it, and it took well over 2 hours just for that.


It's a Maxtor 40gb 7200rpm drive.


Could it be that the HD is going bad? Could it be a lack of power going to it? Or some sort of problem with settings?

have you tired zeroing the drive (low-level format) and then re-formatting it to see if it helps??

for example (from a live cd):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

(obviously this operation will take a very long time...)


also, you can adjust your hard disk parameters with hdparm...

do a "man hdparm" for info on this...

you can run a test to see how fast your drive is performing like this (for example):

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

post the results of this if you like...

we can help you tweak your drive if you want...

I have the exact same hard drive and the same problem - it's SLOW...about 20% of what it should be...don't have a solution.

Your Maxtor HD come up on your system as Quantom Fireball....cause Maxtor bought out Quantom and put Maxtor stickers on the drive and sold them as maxtor drives for fairly cheap...the problem is they dont really meet up to maxtor speed standard the seek time is slower and the cache is less...result slower HD

P.S I have one of those drives...and hdparm help speed it up

Check if dma is enabled:

Enable it by doing hdparm -d1 /dev/hdx

Another possiblity could be that the HDD is overheating and slowing down. Maxtor HDDs are notorious for running super hot and they need to be in a box with good ventilation or a HDD fan. That is one of the huge reasons I went with WD instead of Maxtor. The WD drive might be a tad bit more noisy but it runs cool. Just an idea for you to look at.