• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

A Letter to Abit

J

JonJon

Senior member
i sent this email to Abit tech support. i am curious as to what you guys think is the problem since they move like molassis.

_____________________________________________________________
i have an abit kt-7 raid with a maxtor 30.7 diamond max plus 40 ata/66 hard drive. i'm running an AMD Thunderbird at 900mhz at defualt speeds and voltages. i am currently running windows ME. my hard drive is a slave on the same IDE channel as my CD Rom with my other two CD's on the other IDE channel. after installing the latest via bus mastering drivers and enabling DMA on my hard drive in order to improve my lack luster disk performance i get freezes in windows where the mouse won't even move. i have to physically turn off the computer and then back on again for bios to redect the hard disk. all the benchmarks i have run show my disk performance to be very sub par and i am curious what this problem is. thank you very much for a speedy reply

Jon
 
I have the same problem with a similar system. Performance is very poor with my 30 gig maxtor. CPU usage goes to 50% while transfering files... Nothing helps, But in my case I think the hard drive is the problem not the mobo.
 
thanx lsd.....i'm probably going to agree with you too...not sure what the benchmarks on it were for my last mobo but i don't think it was that much better....have you spoken to maxtor about this???
 
Not yet, This is the 3rd hard drive I've recieved due to past failures. I think I'll just stick with it for now.
 
Ive had problems with athlons and abit MBs and hard drives. When these freezes happen, does the HD light continuously blink on and off rhythmically? I fixed my problem by switching to ata/33. Try changing the cable.
 
Does this situation improve by making the harddrive the master and not the slave to the cdrom. (am I reading this correct?) There are some known issues with that type of setup.
 


<< I thought there was a &quot;known issue&quot; between Abit KT7 and Maxtor HDD's? >>


Got link? These via chipsets have an issue with everything 🙁.
 
I may be off base, but here goes. Why are you running your (only) hard drive as the slave on one of the ATA33/66 channels? You have the RAID version of the motherboard- USE THE EXTRA CHANNELS! You do NOT have to enable RAID to use the ATA100 interface- you can use them as standard IDE interfaces. I would recommend moving your HDD to the Master drive on channel one of the RAID IDE interface. Be sure to select the ATA100 as your 1st (or second if you ever use a floppy) boot device in the BIOS. DO NOT go into the highpoint RAID BIOS and try to set up a RAID. Just use the cahnnel as a standard IDE cahnnel. Also, I would make sure that if you have a CD-RW, that it is not on the same IDE channel as your source CD-ROM for copies. This configuration should remedy any problems you may be having with your HDD performance and lockups (IF the lockups are really due to HDD problems.....). Good luck!

PS- I have 2 40GB Maxtor Plus 40 ATA100 drives in a RAID 0 configuration on my KT7-RAID and they work like champs- no problems. I also have a 20GB Maxtor on one of the standard IDE channels that works great too.
 
first of all never said they ignore emails, they jsut take a long time to reply. second i've tried running my HDD off the other channels before and its performance is jsut as poor however the freezes now longer occur. when the freezes do occur,my hdd light doesn't blink, it just stays constantly lit. i have a brand new cable and due to case limitations i can't really switch my hdd and cdrom around right now. i've sloved the problem by using VIA's dma tool to turn off the dma, don't get any more freezes now. but this is pathetic i mean this board and this hard drive should both be running at ata/66, there is no reason that they shouldn't......

Jon
 
Back when this board first came out, just after AnandTech made it an Editor's Choice, I cautioned someone in the Forums to think twice before buying it, given Abit's and High Point's track records. And I got flamed good by a couple of Abit lovers.

All I can say, fella, is -

HA HA HA HA HA

😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
 
I believe there is an issue between the Abit KT7 and the Maxtor HDs.... Ive now read many threads about this MB and Maxotr HDs performing very poorly. I have the same HD and get excellent performance on my onboard ATA100 Promise controller on my A7V. It also works fine on the VIA HD Controller. It may be a KT133 problem tho because personally I found since BIOS 1004 and 1005 my HD performance went way up but so did my idle temp.... the 2 issues may be directly related. Also with the A7V we can get out idle temp back to normal with a chipset register mod but our HD performance takes a hit.... so it very well could be the KT133.
 
I'm just curious...what does your IRQ table look like? Momentary <not permanent> freezes sometimes happen with IRQ conflicts. Also, why are you running your HD as the slave, and not off the ATA100 controller?

I personnally dislike Maxtor due to past quality issues so I have a IBM 75XP. But I hear a lot of people are having trouble with IBM 75XP's too.
 
i've already tried many times changing my IRQ's and i don't get any freezes until i installed the newest bus mastering drivers from via. but these freezes were also happening with previous versions of those drivers too. i've tried every possible irq config so i know that's the problem. the reason i have the hdd as a salve is because i have 3 cdrom drives and i dont have room for another cable in my case right now. but once again, i shouldn't have to resort to doing this.
 
I know this may sound stupid and you may have already done this but have you backtracked and tried to set it up with just the hard drive and no cdroms. See what that does. And why would you have the hard drive set up as the slave? How does making the HD the master mess with your cable? Everything you're saying doesn't sound exactly right.

I may be off base I haven't worked with a KT7. Hope you get it working like you want.
 
Both my roommate and I have KT133 boards (I've got an MSI K7T Pro2A, he's got a KT7 like you, without the RAID option). We both had problems like this. Mine would hang during file transfers, he would also have random disk access crashes which escalated until his boot sector data became corrupted. Both of our problems were fixed by moving the hard disks to the secondary channel, and putting our optical drives on the primary. Simple solution, even though we have no idea why. Try it out.

On a somewhat related note, I would get random crashes when installing or copying files from my CD and DVD drives. Until I turned DMA off on the optical drives. DMA now stays off until I want to play a DVD movie, which requires DMA to be on. Playback is fine, but file access will crash the system. It's kinda shady, but I can't find any other workaround for it. Let me know if this works for you.
 
I wouldn't call this an always problem. I have a kt7-raid with a 40gig maxtor +40, and I never experience in either 98se or win2k pro the problems you're talking about, and I've been running that way fine for about 4 months, with drives on most of the chains.

 
If you haven't already, take a look at go.to/kt7faq .. I had a lot of problems starting off with my kt7-raid board, that place has fixed pretty much every one of them.. there is a lot of good information there.. there is also a forum dedicated to the kt7-raid board.. you can get a lot of answers there as well.

good luck
 
thanx for the info JJ. i'm going to have to try that out. thanx everyone else who has tried to help out but i've already done/tried most of this.
 
Flash the BIOS to the newest version of course. The highpoint controller may not do you any good as far as throughput, since the drive is only ata/66, but it would get the hard drive off the same channel as the CDROM's.

If you've definitely got an ATA66 drive, then this won't help, but for the ATA100 DMax 40's (and other drives) there is a utility available that controls the acoustic management properties of the drives. These drives come from the factory with a control set that makes the armatures move much more slowly across the platters, which reduces noise but increases read/write latency. You can disable it and get a good bit of performance increase, for very little real sound volume increase (there's also an option which works well for me which allows it to control the volume of noise where it can, without affecting the performance much).

I have a KT7-RAID and 2 of the ATA100 version of the DiamondMax Plus 40, 30.7GB. I haven't had any problems due to compatibility (the way the RAID controller works and interacts with the OS and programs like Partition Magic wasn't good, but the actual functioning of the drives in both RAID and non-RAID configurations. I get very good throughput and acceptable access latency (better throughput in burst and sequential modes than my previous IBM drive, and about the same access times).
 
Hmm, I flashed two systems to the latest Highpoint, and the system would no loger get past the blue highpoint screen. I have had LOTS of problems getting the HPT366 chip to work reliably, or even, properly. Of course, I use the latest drivers and the latest flash. I have just ended up using standard ATA33 cables and not installing the highpoint drivers.

Perhaps the HPT370 chip, found on the Abit board fixes all the problems I've been having, but I think I'll just stick with chipset native ports from now on. Learned my lesson the hard way... grr. I hate making long distance trips to fix other peoples machines 🙂
 
Just FYI both my maxtorx HD's run fine on my MSI K7T Pro2A, so i don think its a VIA thing, its gotta be a Abit thing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top