PCI ATA100 controller

[saimike]

re: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...hreadid=1620555&enterthread=y&arctab=y

i've called up maxtor support and they were useless ...

in anycase, i dont suppose anyone has a maxtor pci ata133 controller (rebadged promise) on an older (p3 1ghz celery) machine and can help me check if their transfer rates between hdd's? i'm beginning to suspect if this is due to the card or my 440bx mobo. thanks!

 

[Mday]

what HDDs do you have connected? How full are the HDDs?

are the HDDs connected to the same cable?

what type of cable (80 wire vs 40 wire) are they HDDs using?

when you boot, the sequence for the card to recognize the HDDs will tell you whether or not DMA was detected AND activated for the HDDs by the card itself.

 

[saimike]

some of the HDD's are rather full, all of them connect at ATA100 based on what was displayed during the bootup sequence, and they all have the right cables (or the wouldn't be detected as ata100 ...).

 

[Mday]

being full would affect the performance.

 

[Zepper]

Transfers between drives on the same channel (cable) can be slow as only one drive on a cable can operate at a given time. Cross-channel transfers should be pretty quick as the two drives can operate (move data) almost simultaneously.

.bh.

 

[saimike]

i tried removing all but 2 drives on different cables, and the performance does not improve

any other ideas?

 

[Zepper]

Is the Promise/Maxtor controller listed in Device Manager under the Controllers heading? If the answer is yes, and you check properties on each channel on that controller does it show that both are operating in some DMA mode and NOT PIO mode? If not, you may have to go into the controller's bios setup or configuration tool under Win and set those channels( or each drive individually) to DMA operation. Making sure you have (and properly install) the latest drivers for the Promise/Maxtor card (get the correct ones as I believe that the ones for the 100MHz version may be diff. from te 133 version).

.bh.

 

[HDTVMan]

I had a serious performance drop but no sign of failure or problems only severe performance drop. The first sign of a problem was burning a DVD as it took 80minutes to complete.

The drive manufacturer made a utility that told me the drive is about to die. SMART did not detect this.

How is the heat on those drives? If they get real hot that will also cause performance problems and eventual failures. Drives need to have plenty of air circulation to keep them cool.

On another note I had an IBM drive that when paired with a western digital would come to a major crawl. I never found what was causing it but when I moved the drives to different places it was fine. Some drives dont play nice together. No it was not a jumper problem.

Also run checkdisk and scandisk not the quickie ones but the overnight runs.

 

[saimike]

device manager lists the drives and the controller, but dont have any info about whether its dma/pio. when the pc boots up, everything shows up as dma ... afaik, i've the latest drivers/bios for the card. however, i'm unaware of any diagnostics tool that would allow me to go in and manually configure the card. when i spoke to maxtor, the impression i got is that this facility is not available at all -- the card comes up and detects dma/pio, they did not build it such that a user/technician can manually change this. but i could be wrong ...

i'll check again, but the hdd's dont seem to be running hot. they were mostly bought in nov2004 so they're rather new. but its a hodge podge of drives -- WD, maxtor, hitachi and seagate. the OS resides on the seagate HDD so if thats the drive that's giving problems, then i'm SOL. i'll try moving hdd's around to see if i get lucky -- or not!

 

[orangat]

You find out whether the UDMA is enabled by looking at the IDE channels in device manager. Now look it up. And check that write cache is enabled by looking at drive properties.

 

[Zepper]

Many WDs have two different settings for Master: one for Master/Stand alone (one drive on the cable) and Master with Slave. If it is not set correctily, it can cause problems. I think Fujitsu is another that has done that. That little peculiarity has caused me much hair pulling - so that is one of the first things I check anymore.
. Another thing to note is that you must be using 40 pin/80 wire IDE cables to get ATA-66 and up speeds. I've gone to using ONLY 80 wire cables and setting ALL drives to Cable select (can be labeled CS, CSel, etc.) then you only have to plug it into the proper plug on the cable for the function you want. The blue connector goes to mobo, the gray connector (middle) is for slave and the black connector (far end) is for Master. If you set the jumpers Master or Slave, then you can ignore position on the cable but the blue end still has to be plugged to the mobo for proper operation.

.bh.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Some good performance diagnostics to use are: SCSIBench, from Adaptec EZ-SCSI 5.x (requires installed ASPI drivers), and HDTach 2.61 (installs its own driver). HDTach only does one drive at a time, so SCSIBench is much better for testing speeds of multiple HDs at the same time.

Normally, 440BX mobos had outstanding PCI-bus performance, but perhaps there is something about the ATA-133 that causes issues? Do you use ISA or USB devices on that system? IIRC, the southbridge combined ISA, USB, and IDE accesses in terms of bus timeslots, so if you have activity on the ISA and USB busses, they will take away bus time from the IDE controller. Lastly, what is your FSB speed, and RAM speeds? There is often a marked difference in performance between 66Mhz FSB and 100/133Mhz on those systems.