HD corruption with FSB??

Does anyone think i would have problems with my HD at 200 FSB?

note: HD listed in sig

Hmm, I've never gotten a hdd above 156 or so FSB without problems. (WD400JB). What's your current FSB? -- Paul

im planning on getting a Kx7-333 as soon as the stores open after holidays etc so, right now i just have k7s5a running at 150 fsb

Does the kx7-333 have a 1/5 divider? If so, I would think you'll be all set, then. If not 200 FSB, 195, I would think. (39 MHz PCI has always been about my limit for the hdd/IDE bus.)

Good luck! -- Paul

yes it has 1/5 divider

Too many factors involved when running high FSB & Data corruption, for all you know it could be the RAM generating the errors written to your HDD & not the out of spec PCI BUS causing your HDDs to fail. All you can really do is buy quality components then hope for the best.

but in this case the fsb will be running at the rams stock rated speed or lower so ram shouldnt generate errors

Your talking PC3200 & not the PC2700 in your sig? Then make sure you get the JEDEC approved PC3200 spec meaning they can run at their rated speed & timings with a default voltage of 2.55V.

Like I said a lot of different factors involved & most of them lead to a user.exe file

sorry forgot to mention what ram in this post, i have two posts discussing ram speeds

JEDEC approved PC3200 spec, this available in canada?

i was thinking of just getting samsung PC3200 because of price. and i live in canada so corsair and stuff like that isnt available here, and shipped from the US costs an arm and a leg

Even the Corsair XMS have problems running at their rated speed with default voltages. JEDEC has only recently approved PC3200 so it will be a while before the manufacturers that sold overclocked modules to get rid of their stock & sell the proper sticks.

Thanks for bringing up the excellent points, Sonny.

In my case, I had run my memory through the memtest86 suite of tests at higher FSB's (157 MHz +) and had it turn out with 0 errors. Since that program is OS and hdd-independent, at least the RAM, RAM controllers, and CPU could be eliminated. (a problem with any one would have generated errors) So, I suppose that left any PCI devices, the hdd, and the IDE-controller.

At any rate, the slower you can get away with running the PCI / IDE bus, the less likely you are to see hdd / data corruption errors. 200 MHz / 5 = 40 MHz, which is still a 20% overclock of the said buses. 195 / 5 = 39 MHz, which is only a 17% overclock, and is likely "doable," depending upon your hardware.

Good luck! Thanks again, Sonny, for bringing up some very important factors. -- Paul

Another thing to look at is PCI Latency. When you increase the PCI latency you can make a HDD or anything else on the PCI BUS more agreeable to the higher bus speeds. The would be slightly slower burst speeds but it will make itself up with throughput so it eventually evens out. Just have a look at the RAID users & their benchmarks when we run higher latencies. We actually want the high bus speeds because the boost in performance is evident that you actually feel you computer become snappier when opening & moving/copying files not to mention loading applications & such. Now the key would be to balance things.

Another thing to realize is if you have a Ceative SoundCard installed. Have you ever heard of the 686B Bug? It was this data corruption issue that started with the KT133A chipset but still caused other problems up to the KT333 chipset because of a missing feature that PCI cards would look for in the SouthBridge. You will have to play with setting in the BIOS like PCI DELAY TRANSACTION, DELAY TRANSACTION, PCI MASTER READ CACHING & more to be able to find out what the combinations are at what PCI/AGP/FSB speeds you are running.

Now you need to take a look at the SouthBridge of your given chipset. Do you really want to deal with the possible headaches you may encounter or do you want to go with something else? Have the KT400s issues with 200MHz/400FSB Data Corruption issues been fixed yet, do the NF2 really have no longterm problems with really high bus speeds? Does it really matter to you since you Format & Reinstall everymonth?

Good Luck We all need it now that I'm going to upgrade & replace some of my parts too.

Paul - Thanks, your too kind