|
|
|
ATA on Nforce2 rubbish
|
Original Message
|
Name: Hooner
Date: December 4, 2003 at 22:06:21 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbishOS: Win Xp Pro s/p 1CPU/Ram: Athlon XP 1800+ 512 PC133 |
Comment: 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...............
Report Offensive Message For Removal
|
|
Response Number 1
|
Name: RobbieDickon
Date: December 5, 2003 at 01:07:20 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)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.
 Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
|
Response Number 2
|
Name: Jimi_l
Date: December 5, 2003 at 01:49:02 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)Hooner, you are going to have to eliminate one or the other. Either it's the drive or the board. Jimi_l
Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
|
Response Number 3
|
Name: Hooner
Date: December 5, 2003 at 02:12:59 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)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
Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
|
Response Number 4
|
Name: Dave02
Date: December 5, 2003 at 02:31:33 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)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.
Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
|
Response Number 6
|
Name: Jimi_l
Date: December 5, 2003 at 02:37:39 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)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
Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
|
Response Number 7
|
Name: jam
Date: December 5, 2003 at 05:28:58 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)I doubt the 4k cluster size has anything to do with it...that's the default when using NTFS. Hooner, You're not posting any info about what's wrong...basically I think you just expect it to be faster. You say it's being reported properly in BIOS & Windows, the WDC diagnostic disk tells you everything's OK, & your speed ratings at PitStop look good. Can you explain what's happening other than "it's not fast enough"? How are your drives configured? Try the WDC drive alone as the "primary master with no slave" & double check the jumper setting on the drive. WDC has different settings for "master w/slave" & "master w/o slave". Are you using an 80-pin IDE cable & is the HDD plugged into the end connector?
Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
|
Response Number 8
|
Name: Hooner
Date: December 5, 2003 at 22:19:15 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)jam, how did my test results look good? my uncached disk speed was nearly half that of the 800 systems like mine benchmarked in the past. How is that good? Anyway, I've solved the problem, it appears I needed an older revision of the nForce2 IDE driver than the latest, but more recent than the one that came with the mobo, sigh. So I ended up isolating an old nForce2 driver from Leadtek's website, and all seems to be good. jam, since I solved the problem, my uncached disk speed has risen by more than 30%, so much for your "good" results!
Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
|
Response Number 9
|
Name: jam
Date: December 6, 2003 at 21:24:28 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)Hey Hooner, I had better things to do than to go thru each & every test result on your system...I looked at the front page & nothing was flagged as bad...
Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
|
Response Number 10
|
Name: Hooner
Date: December 6, 2003 at 23:31:49 Pacific
Subject: ATA on Nforce2 rubbish |
Reply: (edit)Well, considering my problem was with disk speed, you may have found it necessary to look at the HDD results?
Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal
|
Use following form to reply to current message:
|
|
|
