SATA in enhanced mode with IDE HDD's = sluggish

[jdw]

Hi folks,
Got a FOXCONN 865A01 mainboard with P4 2.6 ghz, 1/2 gig ram, and 400 watt power supply.

Was running Winders XP with a pair of WD 120g SATA hard drives, 2 CD ROM drives (DVD RW and a DVD rom) master/slave on primary IDE and this was running great. I recently added an IBM 80g PATA hard drive on the Primary IDE set as master and the 2 CD ROM drives on the secondary IDE set as master/slave. Set SATA mode to enhanced, set HDD boot sequence, all was recognized, but runs hideously slow. Too slow to be usable.

So I change to SATA combined mode and ran with the IDE HD on the Primary IDE set as master and just one CD ROM on the primary IDE set as slave, and all is well. Only thing is I'm limited to max of 4 drives.

It all seems to boil down to runs fine in a combined SATA mode with 4 drives, but ugly slow in enhanced SATA mode. It only seems to run sluggish when enhanced mode is used, no matter if using as many as 5 drives or as few as 2 drives. But of course, enhanced mode is required when running more than 4 drives.

Any ideas?

[808smokey]

You could try an PCI IDE comtroller card and run a hard or 2 of that.

They're only around $30