Maxtor 80 gig Diamondmax 8mb cache and overclocking.

[Pulsar]

I have an epox 8kha3+ motherboard (probably switched the numbers around - new child = lack of sleep).

I purchased the above mentioned hard drive for this new rig, and a 2400+ processor since I knew they had decent overclocking properties.

Now this is the first time I've ever heard of this - but the hard drive is the limiting factor of my overclock! When I approach 150 FSB (tried unlocking this processor 4 times unsuccessfully and finally decided it wasn't meant to be) I start getting corruption errors. At 150 FSB, my maxtor went to the big hard drive heaven in the sky. I got another one, and the exact same thing happened at the exact same clock speeds... I didn't take it to 150, but now I get period errors that scandisk has to fix.

So, I'm back at stock FSB speed. I DID try a different brand hard drive in the rig and was able to boot without corruption at 150 FSB. So tell me, is it the drives being wussy, is it the board corrupting the data, or should I just give up =)?

I suspect it's a maxtor drive issue as both drives corrupted in the same manner. I'd wager that if I pushed this drive to 150 FSB it'd die as well.

 

[o1die]

Could be the drives. Without an agp/pci lock in the bios, you're overclocking your hardrive as well as the other components in your system. Sometimes this feature doesn't even work. I recommend you disable the s.m.a.r.t. (hardrive) setting in the bios, and focus on memory timings for any performance gain. It's cheaper than getting a new mobo or killing your drive.

 

[Jeff7181]

All hard drives are very sensative to the PCI bus frequency... it's not recommended that you go above 36 mhz. Which when you do the math, equals about a 144 Mhz bus... so I'm surprised you made it to 150 at all... and not surprised that one of your drive took a dump at 150, which would be 37.5 Mhz on the PCI bus. If you want to overclock, either do it using the multiplier only, or get a motherboard with a PCI and AGP lock.

 

[rogue1979]

I have three Maxtors running on three Abit KG7's at 150MHz+ fsb speeds no problems.

 

[LED]

I've had Maxtors reach 40PCI speeds , however, YMMV.. what I would suggest is to lower you multiplier, then bump your FSB up to 166+ which will bring the PCI speeds back to 33, then start to increase slowly up

 

[Ketchup]

My IBM 120GXP made it past 40 without any problems at all/ Maybe these new Maxtor drives are more sensitive though. I bought one of them in 120 GB, and l love it. I have an Intel board with the AGP/PCI lock. Why don't you get a new Epox 8RDA+? It has a PCI lock on it and uses a faster chipset.