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Q:  I have low write speeds on my new Maxtor IDE hard drive

A:  This info was based on a reader report in early November 2000, where here said that after about a dozen powerups, his Maxtor drive suddenly had a dramatic write speed gain (in ATTO's benchmark. I assume)

" Mike,
just read the drive database entry by Sung Suh. Maybe I've got a cure (and maybe it's ok allready...):

I had similar experiences with a drive of exactly the same type. This drive was in fact a replacement for a Maxtor + 40G that had gone south after 5 months. After setting up the new drive I noticed MUCH lower performance than with the older one when it still worked (just ~23M/sec reads and ~12M/sec writes). Threw all the usual suspects at it - no change.

Then I remembered that recently I'd read (sorry, can't remember where) that some new ATA100 drives go slow in the beginning just for safety, just in case some really old controller might get confused during mode arbitration. Also it was said that those drives try to do better step by step with each powerdown/powerup and should be "OK" after aprox. 12 cold starts.

I tried it. Powered down the Mac completely and up again and tested each time. No significant change for a while. But right after the 12th cycle there was my drive up and singing! By the way, all this was with the drive(s) attached to an Acard 66.

Didn't enter this into your database because of busy times recently... Hope it helps anyway,
regards
Mike Felsmann "

This seemed odd, but checking Maxtor's web site revealed the story on the power cycling/write verification issue (along with links to a PC only utility for setting the parameters without the power cycling trick). See this Maxtor Tech Note for details. Some new models of Maxtor drives have a write verify feature that is disabled after 10 power cycles. (After 10 times of shutting down/powering off). This is not a fix for low write speeds I've seen with many IDE drives in older macs with PCI IDE cards (even ATA/66 models). My maxtor 27GB drive for instance has write speed benchmarks about 1/2 the read speeds, even after over 50 power cycles for instance. In fact, it also had low write performance in my B&W G3 rev 2 using the onboard controller as noted in comparisons in my review of the Maxtor 40GB drive in the B&W G3.

If you have one of the following Maxtor drive models (or later) however, try starting up/shutting down (power off) for at least 11 cycles to see if that helps write speeds.

• DiamondMax Plus 40 UDMA/100
• DiamondMax 60 UDMA/100
• DiamondMax VL 30 UDMA/100
• All Future UDMA/100 Hard Drive Families