ultra 66 problem:please help!!!!!!

[celeron550]

hi all. i have a promise ultra 66 card and a maxtor ultra 66 hdd,running on an aopen ax6bc motherboard..the card detects the drive as a"dma4" drive,which i assume is ultra66,i am of course using an ultra66 ide cable.my problem is when i do a scisoft hard drive benchmark,i score the same as if i was running at ultra 33 and sometimes even less!!! my question is:am i actually running at ultra66(this is a bx board) or do i have to use a via chipset? i thought the ultra card handled the ultra66 stuff..any help will be most appreciated...thanks guys...

 

[KarsinTheHutt]

Hmm. Do you notice any decrease in speed in real applications?

Sandra isn't the most fine tuned benchmarker, and bmking hdds is somewhat sketchy anyhow. www.pcpitstop.com's benchmarks might offer you a second opinion. keep in mind that this is probably not to accurate either though.

Check your sandra version too. Maybe its an older version and can't detect ata66, a long shot but might as well look.

Good luck!

 

[celeron550]

thanks for the info karsin..im using the latest scisoft sandra...i cant tell if there is any 'real' world difference,as the maxtor drive is really just a spare..my main boot drive is ide 33 on the mobo ide...is there any way to see if it really is running at ultra 66?

 

[brewty]

there probably isn't any problem. even the newest ide drives don't peak past 33MB/s. you won't notice a big difference in speed between ata33 and ata66. i think the only differences there are would be cpu usage. lots of info on this kinda stuff at http://www.storagereview.com.

 

[warlord]

I would have to agree with brewty, and say there isn't a problem. when the old ATA33 drives came out, they barely peaked at 33 just like the new ATA66 drives now barely peak at 66. it will take the industry a while to get hds that can sustain 66mb/sec, but you can't do that if your standard is 33mb/sec.

 

[Mday]

brewty is correct.

drives are not that fast.

 

[koeizen]

if you want try to compare your scores to those found by sites such as tomshardware.com and anandtech.com There is no great performance jump from going past Ultra 33 since nothing stresses it yet (similar to no great difference between AGP2x and 4x). You see better performance from a faster RPM drive or a SCSI drive.