Quick question: ATA 133 on a UDMA 33 mobo?

[Triumph]

Trying to upgrade my hard drive to an ATA 133 80 gig Maxtor. Motherboard is Epox MVP3G-M, which only supports UDMA 33. Is there anything wrong with this? Shouldn't it be okay running at 33?

 

[Athlon4all]

You'll be fine. But performance will be a tad slower cause most modern drives max out ATA/33, but still it should be a worthy upgrade.

 

[RanDum72]

The ATA-133 Maxtor will run only at ATA-33 (or UDMA 33) if you use the motherboard IDE controller. But if you buy a ATA-133 PCI controller card, then it will run at ATA-133. Maxtor used to have deals where when you buy a retail drive, you can get the controller free after rebate.

 

[Triumph]

thanks guys, i've been out of computer hardware for a while, and I thought there might be something I didn't know, since I STILL can't get it to work. I try to autodetect the hard drive in the bios, but it just freezes. if I try to manually put in the cylinders/heads/sectors/etc, it also freezes. I'm at a loss for what to do. I have the latest bios revision, also.

 

[RanDum72]

Is the drive set for 'Cable Detect', 'Master' or 'Slave'? Try setting it for 'Master' (if you haven't done it yet). If it still doesn't work, then maybe you need to buy a seperate ATA100/133 controller card....

 

[Texun]

Get a controller card for the new drive... you won't be sorry. I have an Abit BH6 as a spare. I added an ATA100 drive but the board was stuck in the dark ages with ATA 33. The card was no more difficult to install than a sound card, but the difference was very well worth the $26 that I paid to get the ATA100 performance out of the drive.

 

[Electronics4Life]

Do they make isa controller cards still? Or would ISA be horribly slow negating any ata 100 performace. I tried installing a pci controller card in an old pentium computer and the card would not detect any hard drives. I had trouble with a pci network card in this same computer so I think its pci slots are unstable.

 

[Texun]

Electronics4Life ISA controller cards are still available, but if I remember correctly the throughput is 8MB\sec.

Have you tried swapping other known-good cards in the same PCI slot?

 

[thorin]

Have you flashed to the latest BIOS and/or called 1-800-hlp-epox (er whatever) ?

Thorin

 

[Triumph]

I've discovered that I ran into the 32 gig barrier with this dumb motherboard. I think I'll just trade my dad my old 30 gig Seagate for this 80 gig Maxtor (this is his computer I'm working on). I'm running into too much trouble getting it configured.