Changing hdd speeds?

Z

zoey

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I just built a new comp. I changed the below components and kept the 2 Maxtor HDDs. My bro in law sent me this E mail. Don't quite understand what he is saying to do. (WIN XP)

When you can do:
Your hard drives will need to be set for full speed ATA access also. You might only be accessing at ATA66 because your other mother board only went that high when we set up your hard drive before and ran the hard drive utilites. Maxter also has an utilty for controling the noise of the hard drive. It is set by default for quiet access which actualy slows down the read write access in the drive, and not it's interface speed. This effectively slows down the data aquisition speed through your ATA133 interface even though the ATA133 is working correctly.
 
That's a tough one! There's gotta be somebody out there that knows. I'd sure like to know coz I've got Maxtor drives too...

Mubbers
 
Have you tried maxtor.com??

You'll need to know the model number of the drives (as will we) to sort out the problem...

Other thing: I did a similar thing when I got a new computer and kept hold of the old HDD's. Someone on this very site told me to ditch them as they were slowing the whole machine down. They are now on the municipal landfill!

Mubbers
 
I think it relates to the way the drives were formatted originally to optimise their read/write method when they were attached to the original motherboard. The new motherborad has a faster ATA bus speed. Reformat the old drive after attaching both drives on the new the motherboard.

Hope this helps.
 
This 'ere link is to:

Ultra DMA 33 BIOS Update

Software Downloads

which obviously going to be for completely the wrong drive but indicates there are plenty of util's available for Maxtor stuff...

Happy hunting.

Mubbers (again)
 
If your using the ATA controler on the motherboard you can check whether ATA 133 is engaged in the device manager. Look under the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controlers. The devices on each channel depend on how you have your drives connected. The controler should autodetect as to whether the drives are capable of ATA 133 or not. Unfortunately Microsoft chose to provide this information as a DMA mode.

ATA 33 = DMA 2
ATA 66 = DMA 3
ATA 100 = DMA 4
ATA 133 = DMA 5

AS for the advice given in an earlier reply: DON"T BOTHER REFORMATING.

I have changed ATA controlers several times. I started with an on board ATA 33 controler and have moved to a ATA 66 add in card. Then I moved that to a new ATA 100 card. Each time I noticed an improvement in performance.

You might try a benchmark. I use HDtach. It may help you see whether any changes you decide to make actually help.
 
Posted by psychic51
If your using the ATA controler on the motherboard you can check whether ATA 133 is engaged in the device manager. Look under the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controlers. The devices on each channel depend on how you have your drives connected. The controler should autodetect as to whether the drives are capable of ATA 133 or not. Unfortunately Microsoft chose to provide this information as a DMA mode.

ATA 33 = DMA 2
ATA 66 = DMA 3
ATA 100 = DMA 4
ATA 133 = DMA 5

AS for the advice given in an earlier reply: DON"T BOTHER REFORMATING.

I have changed ATA controlers several times. I started with an on board ATA 33 controler and have moved to a ATA 66 add in card. Then I moved that to a new ATA 100 card. Each time I noticed an improvement in performance.

You might try a benchmark. I use HDtach. It may help you see whether any changes you decide to make actually help.

I'll try that 1st thing thia evening.
 
Zoey,

Also after you make sure the settings are correct in the Device Manager as instrucet above. If that does not work, you might want to check the BIOS settings just to make sure that UDMA is enabled in there as well. Also you could check to make sure that the IDE cables connecting the drives to the Mainboard are 80-Pin shielded cables. If they came out of your old system the cables may only be 40-Pin.

Hope this helps.....
 
Posted by Gokou
Zoey,

Also after you make sure the settings are correct in the Device Manager as instrucet above. If that does not work, you might want to check the BIOS settings just to make sure that UDMA is enabled in there as well. Also you could check to make sure that the IDE cables connecting the drives to the Mainboard are 80-Pin shielded cables. If they came out of your old system the cables may only be 40-Pin.

Hope this helps.....

Already did that, and I have shiny new blue round cables!:D
 
I have a RAID setup on my new system that uses ATA 133. I used round cables when I first set it up, but I changed back to the flat 80 pin cables. I had several problems when I set that system up. I cured everything, but I can't remmember whether changing cables helped. The higher speed ATA standards require ground wires to limit cross talk. Round cables claim high speed ATA compatibility, but I personally don't trust it.
 
round cables don't offer any performance... they just help to keep airflow going in your case because people have problems with the old ribbon cables cluttering things and restricting airflow.

intead of buying new shiny round cables, i just take the time to fold my ribbon cables neatly away. save some $$.
 
My issue about round cables was surport of fast ATA speeds. Taurus is right the fancy round cables don't boost performance they only improve airflow. As far as I know the 80 pin cables have grounded wires that seperate the data wires. I just don't see how the round cables keep wires that transfer data far enough apart or next to the proper ground wires to limit cross talk.
 
Hey Psychic51,

As a Maxtor owner maybe you can help me out. I've got an 80g Maxtor D740 ata 133. Running XP, AMD 1800 with a Soltec ata133 board. In Device manager the ide shows 'ultra DMA 6'. The drive shows properly in the BIOS. It is definately a slow drive, slower than the 40g WD it replaced.

I ran BootVis the other day and it says 'Warning! Disk write caching is disabled'. In Device Manager 'Enable write caching on the disk' is checked.

Any thoughts?
Thanks
 
To see if my drives provoked that Warning I ran BootVis. I found out I must have another problem. I got two blue screens, and had to use the last known good configuration to get back to Windows. Things went fine after that. BootVis came back with a log like it should have, and I rebooted again to optimize. I thought that it may have changed how things load, and I checked to see if it had cured a problem I had been thinking about, but hadn't tried to tackle yet. I have an FTP running on my system to give some friends of mine access to my files. Since I installed Norton's new firewall I have had to restart it manually to get it to work. I had figured that Norton had blocked the servers access, and it failed to initialize. BootVis cured that problem.

As for the drives. I use a on board Highpoint RAID controler, and a Promise ATA 100 add in card. All three of my drives go through those devices. The only drives that are hooked into my MB IDE are my CD ROMs. I looked in the device manager to see whether the write caching is enabled or disabled, but I couldn't find the settings. I know I have seen that one somewhere, but I can't remember where.

That sucks that your new drive that specs out faster is actually slower than your old drive. Mine seem to be working OK. I have experimented with different stripe and cluster sizes with my RAID, and right now I'm a little slower than I was. I got a Via chipset, and it had some PCI latency issue. I got a couple of fixes from their site that helped, and I seem to remember something about using cable select instead of setting up the normal master slave configuration. As I remember that one seemed to help, but I don't think it was all that much.

You might have a problem with cluster size, but i'm too tired right now to gather my thoughts enough to say anything helpful. I know that it had a big affect on my RAID, but it was probably affecting things differently than they would be on a single drive. If I come up with something later I'll post it on this thread.

I tried Si Soft Sandra on my drives. It claimed my write caching is enabled.

By the way, where did BootVis tell you about the problem it found? I haven't used it much, and all I saw was some time based graphs.

I'm off for tonight.

Later
 
Thanks for the info. I'll have to try SiSoftSandra, Got a real lame answer back from Maxtor, that never addressed the write caching question. After looking around I found this at PCWorld:

Maxtor DiamondMax D740X
• 80GB
• 7200 rpm
• 2MB buffer
• Ultra ATA/133 interface
• 8.5-ms average seek time (vendor specification)
• Price when ranked: $150
• Full Specs
• Current prices: $108 to $152

While a respectable performer, this 7200-rpm drive was slower than several 5400-rpm models in some of our tests, so you don't get much more for the money. ( Mar 02)
Test Report

Ouch! Live and learn. Here's a pic from BootVis (which did speed up my boot time). Thanks again for your input.
 
I don't remember seeing that when I ran BootVis. It did speed up my boot time though.

That drive should be the same as mine except yours has one more platter. I got mine RAIDed so it's imposible to compare. I have thought that i'm not getting what I might out of them though. But when I compare the RAID to the standalone HD it definately out performs. It seems to stay pretty linear across the entire drive. The standalone falls off towards the edge of the platter.

I'm attaching a .jpg of my HD Tach. The RAID is on the bottom. I'm looking at the average when I say that the RAID is better. The burst rates seem to be about the same. I recently found another Via Specificpatch that helped that. I'm off the scale now. unfortunately, I couldn't find that .jpg.
 
Zoey, I don't know what model of Maxtor HDD you have but there is a utility for changing UDMA66 to UDMA100.
(UDMA/66 to UDMA/100 Utility)

This utility is used for changing from UDMA/66 to UDMA/100 on drives from the DiamondMax 60 and DiamondMax VL 30 families ONLY. This is an Advanced Utility and its use is recommended for Advanced Users only.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/_66to100.htm


There is also a ATA/IDE hard drive installation utility for Hard drive installation and upgrades.
(MaxBlast Plus II)

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast_plus_ii.htm

I think the first one is the one you may need.
 

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