Drive speed problem on Dell computer running Windows ME

[EricB]

I have a brand new Dell 4100 running Windows ME : 1 Ghz processor and 60G Ultra ATA drive and controller, 384 M of RAM. Testing the drive read/write speed for video capture I get 2,165 Kbps and 9,253 Kbps respectively.

My three year old Gateway running Windows 98: 400 Mhz, 4,500 RPM 40G IDE drive and 96 M of RAM gets 12,800 write and 15,791 read.

Dell numbers should be in the 15,000+ range. After 2 hrs on the phone with Dell technical, no help. Any ideas?

[Anonymous65]

Make sure DMA is turned ON, download the latest ATA drivers for the motherboard, and make sure Ultra ATA is enabled in the BIOS, and make sure you use 80 pin hard drive cable for ATA100.

SK

[EricB]

Drive doesn't list "DMA" but "Sync Data Transfer" which I assume is the same.

Drivers are brand new, computer less than 12 hours old! Cable appears to be 80 pin.

[patrickm]

make sure you have the DMA enabled. if it's on a separate ATA100 controller, make sure you have the latest drivers loaded for it. if it's a western digital drive, you may have to run that "data lifeguard" disk to enable the UDMA mode. i think they're set at ATA33 by factory default. if you don't have that disk with your WD drive, you can get the programs off their website.

i have an asus a7v133 w/promise ATA100 onboard, and i get about 23-25Mb/s sustained write using SiSoft's Sandra benchmarks on a 5400 RPM UDMA 100 drive. i get about 15-17Mb on a WD 15G DMA66 on the regular EIDE controller. very similar results under ME and 2K.

[patrickm]

also make sure in the BIOS that an onboard ATA100 controller loads its own bios. and that UDMA is set to Auto for the IDE controller properties in the BIOS.

(if you set these manually, UDMA 2 is 33, UDMA4 is 66, and UDMA5 is 100)

[patrickm]

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Drive doesn't list "DMA" but "Sync Data Transfer" which I assume is the same.
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sounds like it thinks the drive is SCSI. this will be the case over the Promise controller, but if it's on a main channel this shouldn't be like that. in win2k the latest VIA motherboard drivers incorrectly stuck them all as SCSI. perfomance wasn't bad, but the cd-r wouldn't work. so i changed the IDE controllers in device manager back to the default drivers, and it works fine now.