Why are my HDD heads jumping around on a fresh drive?

I have 2 500GB Maxtors in RAID 0 on a cheap Rosewill PCI SATA RAID
card. The drives are new and I just formatted them. I'm in the process
of transferring several hundred GB worth of photos (~20MB each) and in
the process, I can hear and feel the heads jumping all over the place.
That doesn't make sense to me, the drives are freshly formatted and
clearly not fragmented, the data is in large chunks, so why are the
heads traveling so much?

Thanks,
t

A cheap sata card uses software implimentation of raid, therefore the PC cpu
may be overworked, perhaps this has some implication.

wrote in message
ps.com...
I have 2 500GB Maxtors in RAID 0 on a cheap Rosewill PCI SATA RAID
card. The drives are new and I just formatted them. I'm in the process
of transferring several hundred GB worth of photos (~20MB each) and in
the process, I can hear and feel the heads jumping all over the place.
That doesn't make sense to me, the drives are freshly formatted and
clearly not fragmented, the data is in large chunks, so why are the
heads traveling so much?

Thanks,
t

wrote in message
ps.com...
I have 2 500GB Maxtors in RAID 0 on a cheap Rosewill PCI SATA RAID
card. The drives are new and I just formatted them. I'm in the process
of transferring several hundred GB worth of photos (~20MB each) and in
the process, I can hear and feel the heads jumping all over the place.
That doesn't make sense to me, the drives are freshly formatted and
clearly not fragmented, the data is in large chunks, so why are the
heads traveling so much?

Thanks,
t


Write data chunk,
Update MFT (master file table, disk "index", as it were)
Write data chunk,
Update MFT,
etc, etc, etc,
(+ other NTFS internal operations)

Data & MFT do not reside in same place,
heads have to move.

wrote in news:1168591432.217271.62740
@q2g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

I have 2 500GB Maxtors in RAID 0 on a cheap Rosewill PCI SATA RAID
card. The drives are new and I just formatted them. I'm in the process
of transferring several hundred GB worth of photos (~20MB each) and in
the process, I can hear and feel the heads jumping all over the place.
That doesn't make sense to me, the drives are freshly formatted and
clearly not fragmented, the data is in large chunks, so why are the
heads traveling so much?

Thanks,
t


If a single drive fails in a Raid0 configuration, all of the data is lost
forever.

An article on RAID0 vs Single Drive.

http://faq.storagereview.com/SingleDriveVsRaid0