Western Digital/Hard Drive DMA problems in WinXP

[Jennerstein]

I've been silently lurking, following some of the hard drive threads in case I ran into any DMA problems with my WD 80GB SE. I installed it in my second computer (a Dell 8250, from all those rebate deals) and it seemed kind of slow, so I checked the UDMA settings. It was at UDMA 2. Holy waste of hard drive speed Batman.

Anyway, I removed the Primary IDE in Device Manager, and then rebooted. It seems to stay at UDMA 5 most of the time, except for when I run bootvis (then it reverts back to UDMA 2 for some reason).

Anyway, the problem is that the second hard drive (a Maxtor 30GB ATA 133) always shows up at UDMA 2, no matter what I do. The drives are currently on Cable Select...when I tried installing the two drives as Master and Slave the system wouldn't recognize them. Turns out that Dell's requires you to set the jumpers as CS (at least that's what it said in the user manual).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

-Jennerstein

 

[Budman]

If it's an intel chipset why dont you just install Intel aplication accelerator ?

http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Product_Filter.asp?ProductID=663

 

[Jennerstein]

Thanks for the link.

I installed the software, but the 2nd hard drive is still stuck on UDMA 2. The report generated by the Intel Application Accelerator says that the Maxtor is connected to a 40 PIN cable instead of an 80 pin cable. Hmmm. Maybe Dell's IDE cables are only 80 pin on the master, and 40 pin on the slave? I'll try swapping cables tomorrow and see if that's it.

 

[Viper96720]

if the cable is 40pin you'll only get udma2 max. I use those for cd-roms and stuff. Keep the 80pin for hard drives

 

[styrafoam]

I have a WD 80gig se and I could not get it to boot at anything faster than UDMA 2 with a cd-rom slaved to it. Taking the cd off of the channel and adding a second HDD as slave(a 20gig wd) , or leaving the 80gig alone on the channel lets it boot at UDMA 5. Its strange too because I had the cd-rom slaved to the 20gig back when I had it as primary master and ran into no issues. I first caught this when I noticed in the post screen that it was detected as ata33, so it isnt some wierd windows foul up.

 

[arcenite]

I must now go home and see what my drives are, both of my hard drives are hooked up w/ cd-roms ^_^

Bill

 

[Davegod]

I just checked mine - HDD was on UDMA5 but checked IDE2 where I've a cdrom [device 0] & a DVD+cdrw [device 1] drives and DVD was UDMA2 but cdrom was PIO? changed it to "DMA if available" and it changed to "multi-word dma mode 2" ??

I'd noticed my cdrom had been really slow since last OS reinstall, never seemed to spin up as loud and seemed to take longer ripping cd's, installing things... :/

 

[Jennerstein]

Update on the UDMA issue.

Well I got home today, and started moving IDE cables like mad. I tried two 80 pin IDE cables (besides the IDE cable provided by Dell). In every case, I was never able to get the Dell Dimension 8250 to recognize both drives as UDMA 5. I tried Cable Select, Master/Slave, and combinations of Cable Select/Master Slave with and without Intel Application Accelerator. I'm guessing it's an issue with the Dell Dimension, since other people seem to have reported this problem.

One funny thing I stumbled upon. If I setup my WD as the master, with the Maxtor as slave, Intel Application Accelerator refused to recognize the second drive. If I moved the jumpers back to cable select, Intel Application Accelerator would find the Maxtor and be happy again. Windows XP nor IAA was ever able to recognize the MAxtor as UDMA 5 .

I was planning on using that drive for my WinXP page file, but I guess that's out of the question. I half way want to sell the Maxtor now, since it isn't doing me any good at UDMA 2 .

 

[Ipno]

Windows XP is annoying.

It does automatic degredation of drives based on errors, like if you get errors at DMA5 it will automatically downgrade the device to DMA4, and so on.

Here is a microsoft article explaining it better.

Deleting and reinstalling an interface usually erases this error count and lets you set it at the highest DMA mode availible. However, sometimes the autofailback is stupid and doesn't let you push it farther.

I am still searching for a hack that lets you manually set your DMA mode on XP and disables the auto fail back (my stupid CDR fails back to PIO mode about once every month or so) but in the meantime deleting the interfaces works for me decently well.

Though when I overclock my board my hard drive fails back to DMA4 all the time. This annoys me.

Annoying microsoft.

 

[Davegod]

"delete the interface" ? o_0

wtf is "multi-word dma mode 2" anyway??? Much different from UDMA mode2? CDROMS & CDRW should be on udma2 anyway yeah?

 

[Budman]

ata 66-133 cable have to be connected i a specific manner.

Blue end goes to mobo,gey goes to slave and black goes to master.

I suggest you set both your hard drives to Cable Select (CS) then use the colors grey and black to tell what drive is master or slave.

BLUE=mobo
GREY= Slave
BLACK=Master

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Originally posted by: Davegod
"delete the interface" ? o_0

wtf is "multi-word dma mode 2" anyway??? Much different from UDMA mode2? CDROMS & CDRW should be on udma2 anyway yeah?

delete the interface as in blow out the IDE controllers in the DevManager and reboot to have the driver(s) refreshed and udma2 ..multi is same ..believe just semantics on that..yes to your last query Dave.. your setup is okeydokey ..running well most likely

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Viper96720
if the cable is 40pin you'll only get udma2 max. I use those for cd-roms and stuff. Keep the 80pin for hard drives

I ALWAYS buy 80Pin cables...CDRW/DVD etc all run those.

 

[arcenite]

How do I check what kinda UDMA my drives are running in W2k?

Bill

 

[Davegod]

thanks ScrapSilicon

aRCeNiTe, unless w2k does it different to XP,
device manager > ide ATA/ATAPI controllers > primary/secondard IDE controller > properties > advanced settings tab

 

[arcenite]

Performance wise, is it better to keep hard drives on one channel and optical drives on another channel?

Bill

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: aRCeNiTe
Performance wise, is it better to keep hard drives on one channel and optical drives on another channel?

To get the best performance, you should put the two most used devices as the masters and place the least used device slaved to the most used device (probably your system drive). You won't gain too much but I guess every bit is useful.

 

[Challenger]

I've got two harddrives and two opticals in my system and run the HDDs with a PCI IDE controller.I find it makes it much easier because each CD-ROM is a master and attached to the onboard IDE controller and the HDDs attached to the IDE controller.No more which one is slave and which one is master

 

[Davegod]

which is faster, the onboard IDE or the PCI one? whats the "logical" order?

 

[Jennerstein]

Found the problem:

The bios for the Dell Dimension 8250's 2nd hard drive was set to "OFF" as the default. I had to go into the Dell Bios and tell the computer to look for the 2nd hard drive. After changing the setting to "AUTO", saving my BIOS settings and rebooting, Windows XP successfully found both hard drives as UDMA 5. Kind of strange though, you'd think that if the Bios didn't detect it, Windows XP wouldn't detect it either?