is 39Mhz okay for harddrives?

[Ph33zy]

I can take my 1.6a to the max FSB speed on my P4T-E which is 156mhz. The P4T-E uses the 1/4 PCI divider which means my PCI bus will be running at 39 MHz. All my PCI devices run fine and i have prime95 tested it for 8 hours w/o errors. The only thing im worried about is my Harddrives dying. I have 1 WD 120JB and 1 WD 40BB. Thanks for any inputs

 

[Woodchuck2000]

It's the hard-disk controller you need to worry about. I don't think it will affect the hard disks at all...

 

[WarCon]

Actually I have heard on these forums from many people who are pushing a high FSB that one of the first things to go is the hard drive.

No clue why it would kill the hard drive though. I can understand it trashing installs, but not the hard drive.

 

[Rand]

Your pretty much right on the border between safe and dangerous. Some HDD/IDE Controllers will handle it adequately, and others will start exhibiting problems.
There will almost assuredly be an excess of CRC errors, and possibly slight signal corruption, nothing the the ATA interface's CRC error detection won't be able to handle perfectly but it will probably decrease IDE HDD performance slightly due to some data having to be transferred again.

If you don't mind marginally lower IDE HDD performance, and are willing to accept the fact that the life span of the drive will probably be shortened slightly then it should be safe enough, and you probably won't see any stability issues.

Do keep a very close eye on the JB drive though, as the Western Digital 'JB' drives seem to be rather sensitive to PCI/IDE bus speed.

 

[WarCon]

Doesn't XP automatically downgrade to the next performance level (i.e. UDMA 5 to UDMA 4) after an abundance of CRC errors?