Computer Problems? Computing.Net has over 1,000,000 posts about all things technology related! Click here to start participating now! Also, check out the New User Guide.
Slow HD access
Name: Ken Date: December 11, 2003 at 19:15:33 Pacific OS: Windows 98 CPU/Ram: 64
Comment:
Hi
We have a PII-350 machine that I have upgraded the bios to support 80G HD. I used it for backup but as soon as I plug a cd rom drive into either the IDE interface 1 or 2 the access time on the HD is so slow, the hd just keeps flashing when loading Windows etc.
Is there something wrong with the motherboard or Bios setup or is the CD rom drive access rate slowing the performance of the fast HD.
Name: jam Date: December 11, 2003 at 19:31:58 Pacific
Reply:
Your HDD can only run as fast as the motherboard/chipset is designed to run it at. For example, you can't run an ATA100 HDD on an ATA33 board at ATA100 speed, it will only run at ATA33.
The IDE channels on modern boards support "independent timing", so pairing a CD drive with a high speed HDD will have no slowing effect on the speed of the HDD. This was not the case on older systems though. I don't know exactly when this "independent timing" change took place, so it's possible that your IDE configuration may be your problem.
Summary: I've had almost the same experience: IBM 30GB and 60GB ata100, Promise Ultra100 card, Win98/NT4/W2K. Blows away faster CPUs, as slow HD access is often the bottleneck. Just a word of caution. You must...
Summary: I just purchased a new 3.2gig HD, after loading win98 my drive spins up and down making thing go very slow when i click on anything. is it my drive or something in cmos. I'm running a cyrix m11 300mh...
Summary: I am having a problem installing Win95 from a CD onto a Pentium133 (I don't think those specs are making a difference in this case). From DOS, (booting into DOS), autoexec loads the CD-ROM interface a...
0 
Cannot download anything!
