New PCI ATA Controller and CPU Usage?

[BlueWeasel]

Here's my system:
Epox 8RDA3I Nforce2 Ultra Board
XP-M 2600+ @ 215x11=2.36Ghz
1GB PC3200
Silicon Image 680 PCI ATA/133 Controller (250GB IDE as Primary Master, 160GB IDE as Secondary Master)
DVD-ROM and DVD burner (as Primary and Secondary Master drives on the onboard NF2 IDE controllers).

I was having some performance issues recently with the hard drives and picked up the SIL680 PCI controller (non-RAID) from a local computer shop. I put both IDE hard drives on the PCI controller and left my 2 optical drives on the onboard IDE controllers. Each drive is the master and their are no slave drives (ie, I'm using 4 channels with only 1 drive on each channel).

However, my CPU usage goes way high when accessing the hard drives on the PCI controller -- usually around 30 or 40%, but I've seen it go as high as 70%. My whole system just slows to a crawl when burning DVDs. Yet, the optical drives only use 5% or less of the CPU when in use.

It seemed as though the 2 HDs were stuck in PIO mode, but the Silicon Image program says both drives are running in ATA 6/7 mode.

So far, I've updated the XP drivers to the latest version from the Silicon Image website with no luck.

I'm really suprised to see the CPU spike this high with a PCI IDE controller. What am I a missing, or is this normal?

 

[BlueWeasel]

The PCI IDE controller isn't sharing any IRQs and I've made sure the drives are properly jumpered. I'm using short 10" ATA/100 80pin cables (single device cables), so cable length shouldn't be an issue.

I haven't tried switching PCI slots yet.

I was thinking of putting the two HDs on the onboard controller and putting the optical drives on the PCI card. From what I've read, the non-RAID SIL0680 controller seems to support optical drives fairly well.

Any ideas?

 

[Zepper]

If you have installed the nVidia IDE driver, uninstall it! It was known to be be terrible, esp. in not playing nice with others. IDK if they have improved it much at all, but you can try to update it and see what happens.

.bh.

 

[zagood]

Control Panel > System > Device Manager > Hardware > SCSI/RAID Controllers

Check properties to make sure it's running in UDMA.

EDIT: Also try setting the HD's on master/slave instead of their own channels, and get an ATA/133 cable.

-z

 

[Zepper]

ATA 100-133 cables are the same. And remember that even with single-drive cables, the blue end must still be plugged into the mobo as it is the only place the 40 extra ground wires are actually connected to anything.

.bh.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Actually, I've always had good results with the Nvidia IDE driver.

I decided to switch the drives around -- I put each HD as the master on the primary/secondary onboard controllers and put theoptical drives as masters on the PCI controller. After running a few HD Tach benchmarks, the CPU utilization never goes above 4%, regardless if the HD are plugged into the onboard or PCI controllers.

Initially, I was burning a DVD of about 2300, 2MB small zip files and the system was essentially unusable while it was burning (CPU up around 70% used). Also, the CPU usage was about the same when I copied all 2300 files from one HD to the other, while each drive was the master on it's own channel.

I finally decided to put the HD on the onboard and the opticals on the PCI controller. I just tried burning the same 2300 files to a DVD-RW, and the CPU usage never goes above 10% once burning starts.

Strange.