bonehead harddrive question

[magneto125]

Ok......heres the deal.........i'm tryin to determine the speed of my drive ( 33,66, 100, etc ). But i'm not sure what
it is. Its just a cheapo drive i bought online somewhere its a 40 gb 5400 rpm drive. Is there software i can use
to determine the speed of my drive? I got si soft sandra but it dosen't show me a whole lot. From sandra it
looks pretty damn slow. I'm using a 80 wire 40 pin cable and also i just installed a ultra ata/100 pci adapter
card......but that didn't increase the speed either. I thought thats what those cards were for to increase the
speed, but maybe my drive dosen't support it i don't know. If anyone has any suggestions i'd appreciate it!!!!!!!!!

 

[Colt45]

get the model # and do a google search on it.
model No. will be on the HDD, and if you dont want to open your case, it will probably be in device manager as well.

<edit> a faster controller card and 80 conductor cable wont help if DMA isnt enabled. Check to make sure it is.

 

[magneto125]

I'll try lookin up the model number thanks.
I looked in the device manager and it said dma was enabled on my primary ide channel, sis pci ide controller
but not my secondary ide channel ......hmmmmm.....not too sure what that means.. i don't know if that even
matters because i thought it was on my primary channel not the secondary.
I changed it and will see what happens. I'm runnin xp so i don't know if that would matter.

 

[Maggotry]

Look in your BIOS. The drive should be listed as mode 3, 4, 5....something like that. I may be called PIO. Or look at the DMI screen as you boot and see what mode the drive is in. 4 = ATA66, 5 = ATA100.

Also, I thought DMA was enabled on both channels by defualt on XP? I better check mine! :Q

 

[magneto125]

When it boots it say ultra dma 5 so i guess thats it?
Now it dosen't want to boot.....it keeps askin for the damn boot disk!
It done this before i just upgraded the driver and then it quit.....i guess i'll have to unhook it.
Any suggestions anyone?

 

[magneto125]

Well when i unhooked the pci card and plugged the cable directly into the board it boots fine...hmmmm
Wonder if its the driver or something

 

[Maggotry]

That's it. Mode 5 = ATA100. Why are you using a PCI controller card? Give some system specs.

 

[magneto125]

well i got a ecs k7s5a board, duron 850, 256 crucial ddr, 350 watt codegen psu , and a 40 gb hdd with xp on
it. I just thought i'd try it to see if it would help performance because i was runnin si soft sandra and it did
horrible in the benchmark. I didn't know anything else to do to help performance. Plus the card was only
like 20 bucks.

 

[Colt45]

The K7S5A has onboard ATA/100.
There is no need for a controller card. there's a possibility that the controller card doesnt support ATA/100, which may be why youre getting sh!tty performance.