Hitachi 7k1000 Slow Data Transfer

[decayinjack]

I picked up a 750GB Hitachi 7k1000 drive over the weekend and have had nothing but trouble since!

 

I'm running EFI 5.1 on a vanilla kernel 10.5.1 running on a D975XBX2 motherboard. All eight SATA ports are visible and support drives even though they all report back as Generic AHCI. My WD Raptor SATA I drive and a Seagate Baracuda SATA II both had reasonably fast transfer rates in the 50MB/s range as reported by Quickbench in this configuration. After adding the Hitachi drive, I began experiencing system "hangs". I realized that it was the OS trying to write to the drive and tested it with Quickbench. I found that the new drive had transfer rates below 1MB/s! Thinking the drive was faulty, I tested the drive in a Windows system and found it had transfer rates in the 80MB/s range under Windows.

 

Since then, I've brought the drive back to my OSx86 system and unsuccessfully tried various options to get it to work. Seeing posts that discussed performance issues when the Generic AHCI controller was present, I downloaded bikedudes ICH7R package and updated my AppleAHCIPort.kext. Now the ICH7 SATA ports are recognized as ICH7-M AHCI but the performance issues remain when attempting to write to the drive. Interestingly enough, I can't seem to transfer anything large than 10MB without it hanging. The first 10MB transfers instantly and then the system hangs while it tries to figure out what to do with the remaining file data.

 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, Thanks!