Epox 8KHA+ - Slow hard drive performance - Help!

[Mac]

I just put together a new system using the Epox 8KHA+. Everything seems to be working fine but while running some benchmarks using Norton Utilities, I discovered the hard drive performance was way off.

Basic system setup is:

WinMe, AMD T-Bird 1400, 256MB DDR2100. Running at spec speed FSB and RAM timings.

The hard drive used was a brand new Maxtor 740DX - 80GB 7200rpm. I expected this thing to smoke but it is putting out a paltry 18MB/sec when doing the "Physical" read/write benchmark. I have seen benchmarks over 40MB/sec using an Abit KR7A with a WD 60GB 7200rpm drive. Even though the drive is ATA-133, both mobos support only ATA100. I had a matching drive which I installed, just to make sure the first drive wasn't defective but had virtually the same performance.

I have: swapped cables (both ATA-100/133 rated), flashed to the latest bios, loaded the most current set of VIA 4-in-1 drivers, checked to be sure "DMA" was marked in the Device Manager, configured the drives as "cable select" and then as "master/slave", stood on my head while reciting preamble to the constitution.....

I'm stumped. Anyone have any ideas? Would appreciate anyone solving this problem.

 

[Mem]

Go to intergrated peripherals in bios and check in the "VIA OnChip IDE device " section that primary master is set to ATA-100 not Auto setting.

 

[Mac]

Just to muddle the water a little bit more, installed the extra drive on the Abit system and the Maxtor is still running very slow. Will try setting it to ATA-100 but think I have already tried that once before. Thanks for the suggestion, though. Will post the result.

 

[Pabster]

No shock. Both of those boards (the Abit and the Epox) are utilizing VIA core logic. Load the latest 4-in-1's, check DMA settings, and pray.

 

[Mac]

Doesn't make any difference on either mobo. The Abit board doesn't allow specific UDMA settings. Choices are "Enabled" or "Disabled".

The Epox does allow specific UDMA settings, but as I've already said, didn't improve performance.

Went to the Maxtor site and buried within their FAQ's and knowledge base was the following message:

Is there a UDMA update utility for the D740x or D540x?

Description

Some older Ultra DMA 33 motherboards with older BIOS' (revision date 10/28/98 and older) have exhibited compatibility issues with Ultra DMA/66/100 drives. The symptom manifests itself as a system hangs at boot, and performance problems.

On some motherboards the system does not properly check the UDMA setting returned by the drive. This results in the motherboard attempting to set itself up in Ultra DMA mode 4 or higher - a mode that it does not support. These issues arise because of a bug in the system's BIOS, NOT a problem with the Maxtor hard drive. Typically your systems BIOS would detect this, and uses only UDMA 33 on UDMA 33 motherboards and UDMA 66 drives, rather than trying to use it in UDMA 66 or higher, which the motherboard doesn't support.

Answer

At the moment we do not have a software solution for the D540X and D740X product families, that is, a utility to manually set the UDMA mode of the hard drive down to whichever mode is suitable to your system. We would recommend contacting your motherboard manufacturer to see if it is possible to obtain a BIOS upgrade which eliminates this problem.

One good alternative to getting a BIOS upgrade or buying a full new motherboard to support UDMA 66/100/133 is to purchase an external UDMA100 or UDMA133 controller card which could be installed in a spare PCI slot on your motherboard. These controller cards have their own BIOS which supports large capacity hard drives, and they also have the advantage of supporting UDMA66, UDMA100 or UDMA133. The UDMA card can be purchased at www.maxtordirect.com.

As a short term fix, you may need to disable the UDMA feature in your BIOS setup (typically this feature can be found in the 'Integrated Peripherals' menu of your BIOS setup utility). This would of course slow down the performance of the drive.

Forgive me for being cynical but is this Maxtor's self serving way of saying that Maxtor's UDMA133 implementation may not backward compatible on non-133 mobos? That you may have to purchase one of their UDMA cards, too?