How to enable UDMA-5?

[SteelCityFan]

I have the 800JB Western Digital Hard Drive. I was checking the ATA/ATAPI Information in SiSoft Sandra, and noticed the following...

Under the transfer modes section, it says I have support for UDMA-5, but under "Transfer Modes Active" it says that the current active mode is UDMA-4.

How do I enable UDMA-5?

I am running Windows XP Pro.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

My mb and 98se had UDMA-5 working right off, are you using good IDE cables that will work at the faster UDMA levels?

 

[SteelCityFan]

I am using the cables that came with my Abit TH7-II Raid Motherboard.

Could SiSoft Sandra be wrong? Is there any other way to check?

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

It says when I'm booting up too. After the first screen where it detects all the HDDs, optical drives, etc. it says what all the drives are connected at for me. It goes by pretty darn fast for me, if your system displays it you might be able to catch it if you use pause during startup. I'm not sure if it does this on all systems though.... I'm not sure if there's any other way to check what DMA level your HDD is operating at.

 

[MichaelD]

XP is very similar to W2K, so I'll give this a shot.

Go to Device Manager...on 2K, it's a right-click on My Computer on the desktop, then click Manage and go to Device Manager from there.

Once in Device Manger or what the app the shows the "nuts and bolts" of the PC from within XP is called, go to IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. In there, there's a tab for Advanced settins that should show the current transfer mode and has a drop-down box that lets you pick.

My two Lite-on CDRs both auto-went to a "DMA if Available/Ultra DMA" setting. Most HDs will as well. From the proceedure above, you can check/set it. Good luck.

Oh, you may or may not know this, but if you have, say an ATA-100 (UDMA-5) hard drive and a CDR (UDMA-3, I believe) on the same IDE channel (i.e Master/Slave) that channel can only operate as fast as the slowest device on the chain. This is why I prefer RAID-equipped boards; even if you don't use the RAID features, you can have two HD's an two CDRs all as Masters on their own channels.

Hope this helped.

 

[oldfart]

but if you have, say an ATA-100 (UDMA-5) hard drive and a CDR (UDMA-3, I believe) on the same IDE channel (i.e Master/Slave) that channel can only operate as fast as the slowest device on the chain

This is not true.

Are you using MS IDE drivers or Intel IAA?

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: oldfart

but if you have, say an ATA-100 (UDMA-5) hard drive and a CDR (UDMA-3, I believe) on the same IDE channel (i.e Master/Slave) that channel can only operate as fast as the slowest device on the chain

This is not true.

Are you using MS IDE drivers or Intel IAA?

OK, educate me. AFAIK, the slowest device on an IDE channel determines the overall transfer rate...I've always known this to be true.

 

[bacillus]

AFAIK, the slowest device on an IDE channel determines the overall transfer rate...I've always known this to be true.

that used to be true but with the modern boards due to the independent programmable timing registers in the controller's design, you can run hardware devices of different rating on the same channel without degrading the faster device performance.

 

[oldfart]

Like baillus said, that used to be true some time ago. Hasn't been for quite awhile. IDE channels have independent timing.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: oldfart
Like baillus said, that used to be true some time ago. Hasn't been for quite awhile. IDE channels have independent timing.

OK, thanks for clearing that up...I stand corrected.

 

[SteelCityFan]

OK, I got it fixed the hard way.

I was getting an error on boot up from time to time, and I ran the Automated Repair option on the windows disk.. basically installing it over itself.

It fixed both issues. My hard drive is now in UDMA-5. I assume that since I used ghost to transfer everything from an ATA66 drive to my new drive, the old settings stayed the same.