New maxtor drive is VERY SLOW, need help.

[bashywash]

Hi I just got a new Maxtor Diamondmax plus 45 gig drive.
I have a Athlon 1.3 with EPOX 8kta3+ I setup the drive with the ata100 cable (not on the raid controller) setup win2k and set the via drivers also but
But ever I do my drive is VERY SLOW. Sandra Score of 14305 My Sandra Score.
A friend of my'n told me on some MB's I need to change some jumpers to enable ata100 mode on the drive. I know the drive is not the best of drives but it
Performs far lower then a normal ATA 66 drive! Any help would be appreciated!

 

[LoneWolf1]

Go to Maxtors web site and download a utility called amset.exe. It's part of the acoustic management of the new drives. Maxtor sets it to quiet by default. Follow the instructions on the site to run it and that should solve your problems.

Hope this helps!
P.S. Welcome to Anandtech.

 

[bashywash]

Gave it try and set to fast, score droped by 100.. They also have a util that set ata to 100 which i did try and still im getting sad sad results.
One side note i do have PMagic and my cluster size is set to 32k which is NOT good, but for my prim drive it wont let me change it to anything else!

 

[nicowju]

Is DMA enabled on the drive? Go to System Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager, then click on IDE/ATAPI controllers and find where the drive is hooked up to (Primary or Secondary), then go to its properties, then advanced settings i think... and make sure that DMA is enabled in the drop-down boxes

Also, try reformatting that 45GB drive to NTFS or FAT32. Or try PM 6 or 7

 

[bashywash]

Yes DMA is set for the drives. I went over and checked all cables, made sure I was using good cables for ata100, made sure my drivers were up to date.
I think the problem is with the controllers. The via one is installed but i think the drives are still being controlled by the ms drivers. I thought it would make it easier for anyone trying to help me if i post some pics form my system properties disk menu. Thanks to everyone.
PIC1

PIC2

PIC3

BTW the mass storage "?" is for the raid stuff which i have not installed. But nothing is connected to them!

 

[calpha]

I assume that you have SP2 installed.

Win2k pre SP2 does not have support for ATA100.

Also, Sandra scores aren't reliable. I'd look for a better benchmarking utility for Disk Benchmarks (windisk). Just FYI, I have a Raid 5 7200 RPM U160 4 Drive Raid that got whooped by an ATA66 Raid 1 setup in Sandra. The ATA66 Raid setup was one that Sandra had in it by default.

When I looked deeper into it, (actually ran my own tests), I found a better disk benching utility and the SCSI whooped the ATA66 in overall performance.