Hi I wish to maximize my IDE speed transfer as i'm having it as low as 25MB/sec and often less... My mainboard is MSI 648; this : http://www.msicomputer.com/product/... it states it Supports Dual-IDE ATA 66/100/133 so the mainboard is ok... now; is there a way to see what ATA speeds are my hard disks? and what about the cable? could it be that I've used an older cable to attach which might be ATA 66 or so? Or is the cable 'one type for all'? Thanks in adv

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On a hard disk greater than ATA33 you need and 80 way cable. ATA33 and below used a 40 way cable. If you use a 40 way cable on a ATA100 disk it will work but you will only get ATA33 speeds. Hard disk bought in the last three years or so are almost certainly ATA100 at least. 80 way cables have the same number of pins as a 40 way cable but they have more ground wires to minimise cross-talk and interference induced by the higher data speeds. You can tell an 80 way cable by the wires being thinner and a lot more of them. The connectors on an 80 way cables are colour coded and the blue connector MUST go into the motherboard. They are not reversible like 40 way cables. The grey connector is Slave and the Black connector is Master but this only applies if you are using Cable Select. If you are using Master/Slave jumpers, which is preferable, either connector will do but the blue connector has to be on the motherboard. Stuart

Good post by Stuart I would just add one thing. The cable connector intended for the motherboard MAY be other colors besides Blue. I have seen Yellow, Red, Blue and Black. I have one cable that the entire cable is Yellow with Blue, Grey and Black connectors. Then there are some round cables, which would probably not come on a pre-built system.

If you are timing a copy between two hard drives, 25MB/S sounds about right for your system. But another way to measure your hard drive speed is with something like: HD Tach http://www.simplisoftware.com/Publi... or Disk Speed http://www.snapfiles.com/get/rkdisk...

You can check at which speed your IDE controller is working by going into Control Panel, Device Manager. Expand the IDE/ATA/ATAPI Controller and select IDE Channel and click Advanced tab. There you will see the transfer mode of UDMA 2 or UDMA 4 or UDMA 5. This is the speed your IDE device is operating at. There will be two IDE Channels: One is for the Hard Disk and the other is for the DVD-ROM drive. You may have connected more than one IDE device to each channel. Then you must see the transfer mode of each connected device. If you do not see UDMA, then you may see PIO. That is too bad. Then you must try to make your transfer into UDMA mode. Hope the above helps. Regards SuatCINI

Drive Rocket can show you a chart of how much of a speed increase you can expect if you install the product. If you have a compatible IDE drive, change the amount of data the drive reads and writes at one time from 1 sector to 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32 sectors. Increases in speed can be dramatic, according to the companies. Drive Rocket has a well-designed installation program that lets you perform a series of benchmarks to gauge which blocking factor. ----------- Lonet [url=http://www.drivenwide.com]Search Engine Optimization[/url]