Slow ST360020A

[Patch11]

Was wondering if anyone had any ideas, I purchased a brand new Seagate ST360020A 80Gb hard drive which came in an external enclosure with a USB connection which I intended to use soley as a back-up storage drive. For a week it ran okay and then the read/write speed took a nosedive. Suspecting the USB link I removed it from the enclosure and installed the drive in the computer on a spare IDE cable, ran FDISK and formatted to two partitions FAT32. The drive still runs painfully slow and seems to use up a lot of CPU speed when accessing.
Disk cache is on
1Gb Ram
2GHz P4
Western Digital 40Gb primary drive

 

[kestrel1]

Could be the drive controler is failing, if this is still under warranty get it changed.

 

[wolluf]

Run the seagate diagnostic (available on their website) to check its status - and if failing, then follw kestrels' advice.