Any Hardware GURUS's in the house ?

[darkufo]

OK, I have a i405L motherboard from Jetway which has the following:

Two PCI IDE controllers support PCI Bus Mastering,ATA PIO/DMA and the ULTRA DMA 33/66/100
functions that deliver the data transfer rate up to 100 MB/s.

I also have a HDD with the following claimed specs:

Mode 5 Ultra ATA 100.0 MB/s
Mode 4 Ultra ATA 66.6 MB/s
Mode 2 Ultra ATA 33.3 MB/s
Mode 4 PIO 16.6 MB/s
Mode 2 multi-word DMA 16.6 MB/s

Ok, now for the questions.

1) I am not seeing the sort of speeds mentioned above Any thoughts as to what I am doing wrong
2) What are all these different modes and can I set these anywhere or get my pc to use them ?
3) Any advice on what to look for/check to see if I am running at max speed. I guess I am not as the bencmarking software claims that my drives are running slowly

P.S I am using P2.5Mhz, 1.5GB Memory on Windows XP Pro.

Many thanks once again in advance.

[Jester700]

What results are you getting? For sustained transfers, a typical 7200 RPM drive will only transfer from 25MB to 50MB/s, depending where on the platter it's accessing. 5400 RPM drives are slower yet - the hardware itself is nowhere near as fast as the interface.

[darkufo]

Hi Jester,

I'm getting around 13-15 MB/s on my 7,200 HDD. I have been running Sandra SISOFT benchmark and this tells me that I'm running a lot slower than other make and models of a similar spec..

I have checked that I'm using DMA in Control Panel,System, Device Manager.

[Mrhide]

1- make sure you don't have a CDROM on the same ide cable

2- try installing this : ftp://ftp2.megasat.ch/jwtw/driver/845_iaa_2126.zip

or others from http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/download/driver/index.htm#845

good luck !

[Gazorgan]

Check your cables. You won't go any faster than 16 MB/sec unless you have an 80 pin cable. 80 Pin cables have different flavors, with ratings of 66-133.

Also, with IDE devices, you can only go as fast as the slowest device. So, if you have a slow CDROM drive on the same cable, your stuck at the slowest speed.

Now, UDMA mode must be enabled in XP. Go to Device Manager, select your controllers and properties. You are looking to see if DMA is enabled or it's stuck in PIO mode. If it's stuck in PIO mode, delete the device and re-boot, it should come back up in DMA mode.

[darkufo]

Great answers one and all.

I'm going to look at the following when I open up the beast tonight.

1) Check the Cables. - Is there a way to know what cables I've got ?
2) Check to see where in the chain my DVD-RW/CD-R Drive is attached. I have a horrible feeling this is on the same cable as my Boot Drive.
3) Check that BIOS UDMA is enabled (It is enabled via Windows).
4) Look at the 2 software links above.

Some other questions:
1) Can you run a CD-R Drive on it's own IDE Channel ?
2) Will there be any major impact of having my 2 HDD on the Same IDE Channel ? (Currrently I think I have BOOT Drive and CD-R on the same cable, and my other HDD on its own).

Many thanks once again to all the helpful information and for taking the time out to help me.

[Bumstead]

If you have flat ribon cables you'll need to determine if you can see 40 (which is OK for a CD-R) or 80 lines (needed for Ultra ATA 100) in the cable. If you have rounded cables, you can be fairly certain there are 80 lines in there.

Any IDE device can run on it's own channel. Just set the jumber on the divice to master or cable select and position it at the end of the cable.

No problems with 2 HDDs on the same channel. Just set the jumpers for master and slave or use the cable select jumper configuration.

[darkufo]

Thanks Bumstead, nice one.

Looking forward to checking some of this stuff out tonight and getting a bit more UMPFF from my PC

[M.AD]

Try accessing the BIOS. Press DEL key on boot usually.

[Gazorgan]

80 pin flat cables are more rigid than 40 pin. You CDROM more than likely came with a 40. The 80 will have more strands, but thinner. You can tell looking at them side by side. I have one in my dest that's stamped 80, but that's not typical.

[Jester700]

Try all these things; if something fixes the issue, there ya go.

Having said that, not all of the above is universally true. I have a 40 pin IDE cable on my ATA33 HD, AND it shares the channel with an ATAPI device. I still get over 20MB/s. Given that this is an old half full 10GB IBM (early 7200RPM model w/ 512k cache), this is a decent result. The 40 pin cable can pass 33MB/s - it was the standard for ATA33. ATAPI devices should not affect transfer rate, as long as they allow DMA on the channel and are not used during testing.

[doom969]

8) Dont forget to check in the bios (usually accessed by pressing delete at boot) that pio mode 5 or 6 is enabled.

Also dont forget to check that in the windows properties of your drive that the "dma" box is checked.

If your chipset is VIA you may want install the "4 in 1 patch" and the "ide busmaster patch"

found at http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2

d0oM!

[Mrhide]

-rounded cables doesn't mean it's 80 lines ! that's a real "weird" assumption!

-one device per cable is always the best if it's possible else group the device by their speed ( cd with dvd, hd with hd...)

-check the pic for 80 vs 40 !

[Jester700]

-one device per cable is always the best if it's possible else group the device by their speed ( cd with dvd, hd with hd...)

Ideally, yes. But I've had good results with channel sharing, and it has an added benefit of allowing easier on-the-fly disc copying, if that's a consideration.

[darkufo]

Yep, found that I had Write Cache Off in the BIOS, my drive selects were not set correctly to Master and Slave. All now runnign 3 times faster !!!

MANY MANY THANKS TO ONE AND ALL