I'm running Win98SE on a Matsonic MS8308E m/b and have a Western Digital system drive running UDMA33 with a transfer rate between 7Mb/s and 15Mb/s (as reported by HDTach). I've replaced the slave drive (was a Seagate Cheetah 7200rpm 9Gb UDMA33) with a brand new Fujitsu Picobird 16H (7200rpm 40Gb UDMA100) drive which is meant to be able to do >20Mb/s transfers - but I see only 3Mb/s (it was just 2Mb/s before I enabled DMA in the device manager). Any ideas? I am using an 80-way UDMA66 IDE cable and the drive is correctly recognised by the BIOS. I've tried setting the drive to UDMA33 and UDMA66, but the data rate does not change.

-- Andrew Edney (andrew.edney@virgin.net), August 16, 2001

Answers

This might have something to do with the dreaded IDE Interleave, Fast drives will only function at the speed of the slowest drive on any IDE cable. As a test remove the old WD and see if performance is increased if so you may have to put the old drive on another IDE channel.

-- John Holroyd (johnh@aone.co.uk), August 16, 2001.

I'm beggining to wonder if maybe your board or HDD is faulty in some way having looked at your later post about SD_Ram timings, it could be worth while ringing our Technical dept on 0161 763 5506 to see if they have any detailed advice on the Matsonic boards.

-- John Holroyd (johnh@aone.co.uk), August 16, 2001.

Are you using the integrated Video Card? Because it might well be limiting your SD-Ram speed to 100MHz it's default settings apparently, Also having a look around on Tom's HArdware I noticed that they singled out the IDE bus on this chipset for some critisism due to its use of poor default drivers. I've never been that fond of the SiS 730S chipset, yes it has tight and clever integration but it does seem to throw the occasional curveball.

-- John Holroyd (johnh@aone.co.uk), August 17, 2001.

Thanks for your response. If it was running at the speed of the slowest drive I would be better off than I am now.

I'm thinking of trying the CD-ROM as the slave on the primary IDE channel (as it supports UDMA33 like the WD drive) and the Picobird on the secondary channel by itself, but don't know if that will allow UDMA100 (i.e. the socket on the m/b is not blue) or just UDMA33.

I'm also toying with putting the old Seagate drive back to see what rates it gets...

-- Andrew Edney (andrew.edney@virgin.net), August 16, 2001.

Phew, last night was fun. After a lot of messing about, I am now running the Picobird as the master on the primary channel. The machine is a lot quicker and quieter, but I'm still seeing just 15Mb/s tranfers (PIO Mode 4?), but DMA is working because HDTach shows just 2% CPU utilisation. However, the WD drive transfer rate used to reduce, the Picobird is dead solid on 15Mb/s. The WD drive is now master on the secondary channel (with the CD-ROM as slave) and gets just 3Mb/s -- not that it matters too much. The only place I can get a drive about this is as primary master -- don't know what could be the cause. As a matter of note, trying the old Seagate drive was much the same (just under 3Mb/s).

-- Andrew Edney (andrew.edney@virgin.net), August 17, 2001.

Hmm, the forum seems to put the posts in a funny order. In reply to John's question: I was using the integrated video to start with (which worked find at PC133 too), but am now running an old (but otherwise OK) Riva TNT card in the AGP slot. With regard to drivers, I switched to the standard dual-IDE driver (from the SiS one) to no effect.

-- Andrew Edney (andrew.edney@virgin.net), August 17, 2001.

Ah, ha. Got around to updating the BIOS at the weekend (been a long time in getting around it it I know) and the problem has totally gone away. I'm now getting 40Mb/s from the Picobird and 10-15Mb/s off the old WD drive. Also, I can now rip CDs using the IDE CD-ROM drive without all the horrible crackles I used to get before.

-- Andrew Edney (andrew.edney@virgin.net), December 10, 2001.