Hi everyone,

I have a new PC, with a Western Digital Caviar 80GB ATA100, 8MB cache
and a CD-RW (MoBo support ATA133).

When I got all of it hooked up it wasn't working too well (not detecting)
the Hard drive). I changed my IDE cable for a much older one and it was detecting the HD as:

LBA, ATA 33 followed by:
Primary IDE channel no 80 conductor cable installed.

I read somewhere that it was because the cable was too old, so I changed to a newer one and now it's detecting both IDE devices. The Problem is that the access time for my HDD is incredibly slow, I benchmarked the HD with Sisoft Sandra and I got results that are about 3 times slower than comparable HDs.

I ran some diagnostic tools found on WD's website and it didn't report any error. I also checked with the same tool that ATA100 was enabled. I noticed though that when booting after the system POST, it detect both drive as PIO 4 something.

Shouldn't that be ATA100 for the HD and ATA33 for the optical device? I'm starting to wonder if that couldn't be the source of the performance problem.

Oh yeah, I also tried switching drive from IDE1 to IDE 2, didn't help still detect as PIO 4.

I am not an expert here so thought I would ask for help/suggestions. Thank you very much in advance!

JayF

Hi everybody,

I just thought I would flash my bios to the latest version, although the release note that was on the site didn't mention anything about HD, it worked!!

But still, I would like to know what is PIO 4...hehe.

Pio mode 1......ide.......1-4mhz
pio mode 3,4....eide......11.1-16.7mhz
udma 2...........ata/33....33mhz
udma 4...........ata/66....66mhz
udma 5...........ata/100...100mhz