Question about hard drives (speed problem - hard drive acting like parallel port)

[Tib]

I have 2 80 gig drives and an Iwill card with 2 9.1 giggers. So I have 4 hard drives in all but only 3 drive letters for hard drives.

I took these 2 80's ot of my fileserver because, for some reason, on my abit bp6, when I am loading win2000, it freezes up right in the middle if I have 2 drives on the same ata/66 cable. If I take one of the drives and put it on the udma33 plug, it says "no operating system" during bootup. Weird huH?

Anyway, I had to take these drives out of my fileserver, and put them into my computer. these drives are both filled up with mp3's (about 5-10 gigs free on each drive), but I move files around a lot. right now, whenever I move files, my computer acts like it's using a parallel port and the whole computer slows down, to as if it were using 16 megs of RAM in win98!. I have 448 mb RAM, IDE RAID 0, and a p3 450 oc'd to 558.

Whenever I copy files on the RAID, it goes WAAAAY fast, even faster than the ata/66 on my file server. Even if it's on the same drive, it still goes WWWAAAY faster. But if I'm copying on the 80 gig drives on this computer, it goes slower than hell.

These 2 80 gig drives perform just fine on my fileserver. I never got a chance to boot up both of them on the fileserver at the same time, because it didn't work. But I did it here, why is it so slow?

When I put the 80 giggers on the fileserver (tried both, 1 at a time).....it ran HELLUV fast. I mean, I didn't know they made hdd's that fast these days! But on this computer, slower than I can imagine!

per the person I bought the mobo and chip from, I downloaded the VIA driver updates for the mobo. That didn't do crap, and it made my "primary IDE controller" non-functional with a conflict. So what's up now? What should I do? Any tips? Anyone ever had this type of problem before?

Please don't tell me it's a problem with my RAID, because it takes up "system recources" - I sincerely doubt that it takes up this much recources, and besides, when I'm copying on the RAID to the same drive, it doesn't take up any recources at all (at least not noticable).

My system recources (per Windows 98....) are 83% free, so it ca't be a problem with that. What else can go wrong?

Thanks for all your help.....I greatly appreciate it. I'm pretty dissapointed (so far) and upset, especially cuz I was thinking of adding a 3rd and 4th 80 gig drive soon to comlete my mp3 collection.

Thanks,

Tibor

 

[Tib]

UPDATE:

OK well I did some more tests....

I copied instead of moved files - same problem.

I found out that even if I copy stuff on my RAID, it still slows my system down. However, it copies A LOT faster - like 10x faster - than using the 80 gig drives.

On any other computer i've used, so long as I'm not copying stuff on the main hard drive that windows is running on (c, then it doesn't slow the computer down. What gives? Why am I getting this problem?

Also, is there any way to test if these drives are using DMA / ata/66? Cuz i think it's just running at plain old 33 mbits instead of 66 or 100.

Thanks,

Tibor

 

[Tib]

UPDATE again (about 15 minutes later):

OK I put the 2 80's on their own cable now. So I have them on master on their own ATA/66 cable, and I pulled out the cdrom. There are no other ide devices besides the raid, which is plugged into the raid card.

I get a different problem now - it will copy about 5 or 6 files REALLY fast, and then it will lag for about 4-5 seconds, just hanging there not letting me do anything with my computer at all. Then I can use it again (type, move mouse around, etc.) for about 2 more seconds.

What's up w/ this and what can I do to fix it? Do I need to buy myself an ATA/100 card or what gives?

Thanks for all of your help.

Tibor

 

[SillyMan]

I know these suggestions sound simple so I assume you have already tried these but will say any way just in case you haven't
have you checked in bios to see if cacheing is checked and double checked all your bios settings
also have you checked the property settings on each one of the drives in the control panel, an last have you checked the settings in control panel under preformance file system

 

[Tib]

Bump.
still have problems...still slow as ever.
I bought an ATA/100 Promise PCI card from someone right here at anandtech, so I hope that will fix it.
If not, I'm gonna move all these drives right back to the fileserver, in the ata/100 card. Hopefully the ATA/100 card will work on my gaming comp though...then I can carry it around (much smaller case).

I tried doing some changes...in msconfig.exe, there is an option to "override" some stuff on the disk drive. Cuz I checked in performance, under System in Control Panel, and it says that it's using MS-Dos compatibility mode on drives D and E (my 2 80 giggers). Well, in msconfig.exe, I checked the thing to override that, and it didn't seem to help anything at all.

Anyone else got any other help they can give me? I wish I had some more computer friends w/ time on their hands who could help me out in situations like this.

Thanks,

Tibor

 

[Slikkster]

I'm not sure which OS you're actually using right now...seems to be win98se, so try this fix:

MS-Dos Compatibility Mode Issues

More info on this site, too:

More Links here

For now, you're particularly interested in the first link from Microsoft above...pay attention to fixing the "noide" value in the registry it refers to.

 

[Tib]

yes you're right...it's win98se!

how did you know? Cool thanks, I'll try it when I get home.

Tibor