Problem with Serial ATA drives and gaming

[jmsabatini]

I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out why games (e.g. NWN, Far Cry) are choppy when running off either of my Serial ATA drives. They run just fine off the lone IDE drive in my system. I have the latest drivers for every component in my system, I've defragmented the drives, etc. At this point, I'm wondering if I have to: (a) get different SATA drives, (b) get a PCI SATA card to replace the built-in 3114 controller, or (c) just forget about SATA because it's still in its infancy.

My system specs are:
DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B
512MB Corsair XMS in dual-channel mode
eVGA GeForce FX 5900 SE
120GB WD Special Edition on IDE1
(2) 80GB SATA Maxtor DiamondMax Plus drives

In Neverwinter Nights, the choppiness is really bad when playing from either of the SATA drives. Smooth as silk when running from the Western Digital drive.

Could there be a Windows setting I'm missing (or registry entry)? Is it possible my SATA drives don't have the 8MB cache they are supposed to have?

What would you do in this situation?

Thanks a lot.

 

[EeyoreX]

Cache is not likely an issue. Are the drives operating in DMA mode? I don't have native SATA so I am not sure if this setting can be changed.

\Dan

 

[SAV602]

In the special issue winter 2004 of Max PC...in the RAID section its sais that "neverwinter nights is known to suffer extremely poor performance on systems that use certain HighPoint RAID controllers"

It sais to update RAID BIOS and/or drivers to the latest version which you did...or go the website and there might be a patch...

funny i was reading that lol