Having real big problems trying to get my drive to run at a normal ATA/100 speed on an Nforce2 IDE controller (not PCI). It's behaving like it's in PIO mode although windows has it listed as ATA, as does the BIOS. My Nforce ATA drivers are the latest out there. Any ideas guys? gettin' kinda desperate here...............

To enable DMA mode using the Device Manager 1. Open Device Manager. 2. Double-click IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers to display the list of controllers and channels. 3. Right-click the icon for the channel to which the device is connected, select Properties, and then click the Advanced Settings tab. 4. In the Current Transfer Mode drop-down box, select DMA if Available if the current setting is "PIO Only." If the drop-down box already shows "DMA if Available" but the current transfer mode is PIO, then the user must toggle the settings. That is: • Change the selection from "DMA if available" to PIO only, and click OK. • Then repeat the steps above to change the selection to DMA if Available.

Hooner, you are going to have to eliminate one or the other. Either it's the drive or the board. Jimi_l

Thanks Rob, got the t-shirt m8. Hey Jimi, yeah, but how? I ran WD diagnostics and the drive came back as fine. I also went to Pitstop and ran the tests, here are the results: http://www.pcpitstop.com/techexpress.asp?id=CCRQKWV0TSMS8T13

I see that your cluster size is extemely small. This will adversely affect the preformance of your HDD. I'm surprised PC Pitstop didn't flag it. If you somethinf like partition magic 7.0 or higher, you can resize those clusters. When you smaller cluster sizes like that then you increase the number of seeks your harddrive has to perform to uplaod a program or file. This is probably your bottle neck. I haven't fooled around with cluster sizing much. Only once. I increase my cluster size to 64k and I noticed a significant increase in performance. Just keep in mind when resizing cluster that you can go too far with it and it can be a space hogg. For instance a file 60k in size will take up 64k of HDD space if the clusters are set at 64k and a 1k shortcut will also take up 64k on your HDD. Good Luck, and I hope this helps you out.

Sorry about the mistypes. I'm a bad typer. Especially when I'm in a hurry.

I remember you saying that the drive runs constantly as well. This is never a good sign I think I would wipe the drive (as you said it was a new install anyway) and try it on another machine. If it is fine then obviously the new board, or some other component in the other machine is at fault. I don't think at this point all the setting changes or software in the world is going to help. You MUST eliminate hardware as a source. Jimi_l