True.

Wow lots of steps. I understand what you are saying though and not too dificult to accomplish. Thanks electro. I appreciate the info. Feel free to give some more if you are so inclined. Hard to find real information on hard drives. Usually it is dumbed down or I don't know where to look.

I was curious about an old drive I have that keeps getting SMART errors, I tired talking to the company, but they kepts saying "It is a SMART Error" I had an error code and everything and they could not tell me what it meant. The drive appears to work fine using an NTFS system on windows, but will not format to any Linux FS. It will not install any OS, Microsoft or Linux, but it can move, copy and store files. I hate to throw it away without trying to do something with it. Right now it stores back up ISO images of all my software.

Since Hitachi is in the business of selling hardware I am not going to ask them. Is there a way to find out what the SMART error is and fix it? Is there a way to remap the bad sectors to the SMART device? In other words do a true low level format not just a zero?

I suspect that the problem is in the first few blocks of the drive because I got it from someone who downloaded PS2 and GameBoy emulators for the PC and had gotten a boot virus (they were the Typhoid Mary of P2Ps----->KaZAA). I have since then wiped the partition and fat tables and zeroed it out with the tool from hitachi. I can not hear any noise to indicate berrings or heads smacking the platters.

Until recently, most computer comes with ide cable at most running at ide66 speed. If you could change
the ide cable, they are available, mostly yellow , or red, ide100 and ide133 cables. They work well both
in linux and Windows.

Tan t.p

Motherboards since 2000 came with 80 wire/40 pin cable. They can still work up to 133 megabytes but hard drives never come close to 66 megabyte per second.

Electro

You have sold me on a rebuild to try out XFS.........I have been with reiser for years and only luck read this thread.....and yep I can do my own timings and will do a warm reboot to test the journal.

Any other tips on real world tests......I am on dial up so big downloads are a nono but I use dvd /cd files alot.

2) if you have the time, any thoughts on unionfs?

I don't remember the article I read some weeks ago...which had some steps on Improving hard disk performance.

After some googling, I found the following articles:

http://www.linux-tutorial.info/modul...ial&pageid=126

http://groups.google.com/group/comp....1e13177fec1e3a

duffmckagan thanks for quick reply...actually never been to L-tutorial b4 so will have to give it a read