Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 NOT using Ultra DMA mode

[LookOutBelow]

My Maxtor Ultra ATA 133 PCI controller card is not using Ultra DMA mode for drives connected to it. I've got an Ultra ATA/100 seagate 3120026A as the only device (master) on one of the 2 controller's channels. Using an high-quality 80 pin Ultra ATA cable.

Still, large transfers/disk activity causes skips in playing winamp, stuttering window redraws, mouse curor skipping around, etc.

This card looks like a SCSI controller to Windows XP (expected according to Maxtor) so there is no way to select the "Use DMA if available" option in Device Manager. I can't find any utilities from Maxtor to play around/inspect those settings for the card. According to Maxtor's site the card will automatically detect and use the fastest DMA mode available, so I shouldn't need to do anything manually. Doesn't seem like it's happnening tho.

Any ideas? My boot C drive which is connected to the motherboard IDE controller works blazingly fast, no skips or stutters (correctly using DMA mode according to Device Manager). Is there any other type of utility that anyone knows about which will tell me what DMA mode is used through the Maxtor controller?

Thanks in advance.

 

[EeyoreX]

I doubt that this is a problem with your controller not using the proper UDMA mode. You can easily check this by either watching at bootup (most cards I have seen tell you at least the drive type/model, size and DMA mode at boot/detection). You may also be able to access the cards BIOS in some cases. In any event, this is likely an issue with the number of devices on the PCI bus, which the controller card is also on. If you are shuttling large data files around, and audio, and internet data, it all adds up and conspires to flood the bus. I'd blame that before saying the card was not functioning at the proper DMA level.

\Dan

 

[LookOutBelow]

Very interesting and astute observations Dan. Thanks for the help.

I actually paid close attention at the controller bios reporting when it booted up and it did report "Ultra DMA Mode 5" for the drive. So it looks like there's something else going on.

Also, after further testing I realized that if I just do simple copies of large amts of data (through win explorer), there's no problem/skipping with the sound. However, the problem is extremely bad when I rebuild a Postgres database from a dump file. I'm running Postgres on Cygwin and if I use this drive attached to the controller to store the db, I get horrible skips and slowdown in audio and video... whether it's winamp or a video in Windows Media Player. If I use a data directory on my main C drive (connected to the integrated mobo controller) there's no problem whatsoever.

Also, I've noticed that even the simple act of of browsing my mail in Outlook (clicking from one email to the other) causes brief glitches in audio as well. The Outlook data file is kept on this drive attached to the controller card as well.

It seems like there may be some IRQ issues here, but if I go into device manager and view resources by connection everything has it's own IRQ assigned to it (the Maxtor card has 17, and the audio has 21).

Any additional help? Is there a good systems management/resource logging utility for win xp that anyone can point me too? Was wondering if I couldn't pinpoint the problem that way.

Thanks!
John