Sol: can you send me a VSEEK file on your JB please?

[Tea]

Sol, I seem to have mislaid my VSEEK file for the WD1000JB. Would you mind re-running it for me?

You will need VSEEK.EXE - www.redhill.net.au/zip/vseek.exe
and for convenience VS.BAT - www.redhill.net.au/zip/vs.bat

Very easy to use. Yoiu can run it in a DOS windows under most operating systems, certainly W9X, not sure about XP or NT. If need be, just boot off floppy. Any DOS version, doesn't matter if the system can "see" the hard drive or not, because it goes direct to the hardware. You don't even have to have a partition on the drive if you don't want to, and it won't touch whatever is there.

Boot
If running off floppy, make sure your disc is NOT write protected.
Type VSEEK (enter)

That's it. Wait five minutes or so while it tests seek times at varous distances. You will see a series of dots start to cover the screen and slowly grow. Eventually, it stops and draws a line of best fit through the dots. After that, you can just press enter and it will terminate.

Now, type VS WD1000JB (enter)

(or VS anything that is 8 letters or less. No extension)

It redraws the screen and saves the result as WD1000JB.BMP (or whatever filename you gave it).

Wait till it's finished - just a few seconds, and press enter.

On the disc are two new files: WD1000JB.BMP and WD1000JB.VSL

The VSL file is the one I need. I can recreate the BMP from it just by running VS.BAT myself.

Thanks Sol.

PS: Anyone else with interesting drives - Maxtor 740, Atlas 10K II and III, stuff like that, I'd be pleased to see the VSL files for them too.

PPS: VSEEK is a great tool, and I'm grateful to Sulo Kallas for writing it.

 

[timwhit]

Should I run it on a Cheetah 36ES?

 

[Tea]

By all means, Tim. The more drives the better. E_Dawg8 put a fair collection of VSEEK files on a page at one time, but he's off doing his bank-manager thing these days and the site is defunct.

 

[NRG = mc²]

I'll run it on a D740X 40Gb and a 'Cuda IV 80Gb in quiet mode... at some point!

I also have a 10Gb Fireball AS but thats in the E-PC and it doesnt have a floppy drive and its NTFS so I cant do anything other than writing a bootable CD containing the files which I've no idea how to do....

 

[Tea]

Thanks Will. A 740 would be nice.

No floppy drive? Shame on you. Floppies are an essential No real computer is without one.

The Cuda. Hmm. I have Cuda 4s, the 40GB but same drive so that's close enough. What mode do they ship in? And how do you switch them? A doenload thingie from Seagate I presume?

 

[Handruin]

Here are a few to fufill your request:

The vsl files can be found here:
http://www.storageforum.net/forums/images/vseek/vsl/

1- Quantum Atlas 10KII 9.1 GB

2- Maxtor Atlas 10KIII 18 GB

For the heck of it I did my other two drives:

3- Seagate Barracuda 18XL 18GB

4- WD Expert 18GB 7200RPM

 

[Handruin]

FYI, I ran vseek from a bootable floppy. It wouldn't work in Windows XP.

 

[Tea]

Thankyou Doug! My word, those 10K Quantums are smooooooth little drives aren't they. Rare to see a Vseek chart like that. Only this little beauty is in the same league:

(A Mark 1 X15)

 

[Tea]

Huh? Why the funny colour? To hell with it, I'll figure it out in the morning.

 

[Tea]

OK, fixed. Dunno what that was all about.

 

[Handruin]

It looks like my atlas 10KII is a little quicker then my 10KIII. I had to listen to the drives to tell which one it was running. I'm certain that those are the correct results for my drives. I would have thought the 10KIII to be a little quicker, but maybe something in the firmware on the drive is different.

 

[Handruin]

Does the tighter dot spread indicate faster seek in that given area? It looks like the X15 is grouped much closter then my 10K's. I'm not sure what the test is really doing, but it sounded like the actuator arm was doing a full seek back and forth.

FWIW, my drives are all running off of a Tekram DC-390U3W (BIOS 4.19)

 

[Stereodude]

If a system has multiple drives how to we know which one it is testing? Also, will it work with drives that are on promise or HPT controllers?

I've got a lot of drives I can test, but there are many in each box.

I can provide results for WD4500AA, WD1000BB, WD1200JB, 45 gig IBM GXP75, 80gig 740x, 60 gig Maxtor Diamond Plus, and maybe a few others.

Stereodude

 

[Stereodude]

It seems it can not see drives on extra ATA controllers (such as promise or HPT).

Stereodude

 

[Stereodude]

Feel the wrath or the first "fast" 5400 RPM drive!

http://stereo.d2g.com:900/WD205AA.VSL

Stereodude

 

[Tea]

Guys, this is great!

I already have results for a lot of drives, but I have to go to work and don't have ttime to post them this morning.

 

[Tannin]

Tea's links were broken. I've fixed them.

 

[Tea]

I have Sulo's documentation around somewhere. I'll look it up tonight and post relevant bits.

What it does is test seek distances not particular areas of the drive. It doesn't care if it's doing (for example) a five-track seek between tracks 1 and 6 or 4001 and 4006. In fact the particular tracks are semi-random, Doug.

The tighter spread should indicate less variation of seek for that particular seek distance.

 

[Tea]

There are comand line switches, Stereodude. I'll look them up tonight. Today I'm on a deadline.

 

[P5-133XL]

I have a machine running XP will all the drives connected to a Promise ulta33 and all I get when I run vseek is that the extended bios is missing and then it refuses to run.

 

[Clocker]

I have a machine running XP will all the drives connected to a Promise ulta33 and all I get when I run vseek is that the extended bios is missing and then it refuses to run.

Is that an ultra33, Mark? Man, I can remember I had one of those the first time I visited SR!! Or did you mean Ultra/133?

Clocker

 

[P5-133XL]

That is correct an ultra33

 

[Handruin]

I got the same message "extended bios is missing" so I ran it from a dos bootable disk and it worked fine. I am using a Tekram DC-390U3W when I received this error message.

From the command prompt I typed "A:\vseek 0" and this ran the test on my hard drive located at zero. Try running through the drive numbers if you have more then one physical drive.

 

[Sol]

There you are done and dusted.
I managed to find three other drives to try. I only got one working though and it wouldn't Vseek. Or if it was I'm not waiting for it 'cause it wasn't doing anything.

The drives are:
A WD Caviar 280 80Mb
A Seagate ST-157A 40Mb
A Conner CP-342 40Mb

If any of these are of interest to either Tannin or Tea, wheather it be to run vseek, take pictures or stop doors from closing or hot pots from damaging bench tops they're yours.

Oh and here are the results
http://users.netconnect.com.au/~seanol/WD1000JB.vsl

 

[Handruin]

Sol, is that graph from the WD1000JB? If it is, I'm surprised how high it got at the end, I thoght that was a newer model? What would cause that?

 

[Mercutio]

Wow. That seems pretty bad. Do we have a (supposedly fast-seeking) 740X yet? Or a Quantum AS? Those are the ones I can run Vseek on most easily, although I can't post pretty pictures like y'all. I think I can probably do a WD600AB and maybe a 800AB as well. Everything else I have in a Windows box someone else has probably already posted (75GXP, DM40+).

 

[Tea]

It's a bit hectic here, excuse my tardiness.

I looked at the 1000JB chart of Sol's and thought exactly that. It seems very odd. I'm sure I did one of it, just can't find the darn file.

 

[Sol]

I thought much the same thing when I saw it but wasn't sure since I havn't had much experience in the area.
I have run PC Mark on this drive (I know its pretty dodgy but I was boared) and I don't have the results to hand but it wasn't very good.
Tony sugested I might try running the WD testing program so I'll give that a go.
If anyone has another sugestion of a utility I could run to see if there is an issue with my drive I'd be glad to have a go.

 

[Cliptin]

Everything else I have in a Windows box someone else has probably already posted (75GXP, DM40+).

Bootable floppy Merc, Bootable floppy.

 

[Mercutio]

What, and lose the 250 days of uptime on most of my linux machines? Just so you can find that the vseek graph for a Maxtor 536X spells "Slug"? Or that my collection of (SCSI) Barracudas is slower than every 7200rpm IDE drive I own at this point?

 

[Tea]

Stereodude, in view of the odd look to Sol's 1000JB graph, a look at your 1200JB would be very useful. Or, indeed, any of the really large drives, say a 120GB Maxtor or IBM 7200. We are wondering if the drive is working correctly - it doesn't look like any of the other recent Western Digitals I've tested - 20, 30, 40 and 60GB BBs.

 

[Handruin]

Just a thought, but could it be a bad cable or noise interference?

 

[Sol]

Just a thought, but could it be a bad cable or noise interference?

Id say it could well be one or both of these things. I guess I'll have to pull the damn thing out to test it though. And with all the crap arround it which could be causing a problem that could be a bit time consuming.

 

[Stereodude]

Stereodude, in view of the odd look to Sol's 1000JB graph, a look at your 1200JB would be very useful. Or, indeed, any of the really large drives, say a 120GB Maxtor or IBM 7200. We are wondering if the drive is working correctly - it doesn't look like any of the other recent Western Digitals I've tested - 20, 30, 40 and 60GB BBs.

Ok, I can do that, but I'll need to know how to tell it what drive to test. The PC with the two 1200JBs in it has 4 other IDE HDs. I guess I could unplug the others, but I'd rather not.

Stereodude

 

[Tea]

Damn it, I have the documentation here. Somewhere.

 

[Sol]

To test a specific drive just type vseek n
where n is the drive number. The drives are numbered starting from 0, aparently the numbers are assigned logically starting at the primary master and continuing through primary slave, secondary master etc. I suspect that drives on a secondary card would come after those on the main boards ide. (They did on my Promise ATA33 controler anyway).

I ran Western Digitals test program and it would seem that my hard drive is working fine. It didn't check to see if it was running slow of course.

 

[Handruin]

My EIDE drive came before my SCSI drives, for those who have mixed setups like me, this could throw you off.

 

[Stereodude]

Here's my first WD1200JB.

http://stereo.d2g.com:900/WD1200JB.VSL

Stereodude