New
#1
Stange effect of partition on drive performance
I just had a strange experience I don't know how to interpret. I got a used laptop that was distressed and would not boot. I pulled the 500GB SATA II drive and ran some tests on it, and was dismayed to find transfer rates of under 20MB/s. I ran CHKDSK on it, which produced no errors and did not change the performance. The drive passed all SMART and self-tests.
So I put the drive back in its machine and began to try to repair the boot. That led to trying to do a factory recovery, but that also failed. Finally I decided to install Win7 afresh from a DVD, and as part of that I deleted the two existing installation partitions and let Windows create new ones. That went very smoothly, and after all the dust settled I ran some performance tests on the drive again. Now the drive was clocking somewhere in the 70MB/s range!
Great news, but I'm trying to figure out what changed. The machine had been dropped, so I feared HDD damage. There is one CRC SMART error, but aside from that everything is perfect. I don't know what reformatting the partitions has to do with drive performance.