ASUS A7V133 ATA100 and IDE 66.....?

First off, is it possible to switch directly from my old IDE 66 ports to the ATA 100 ports on the motherboard? Do I have to reformat the hard drive? I am using a Western Digital WD200BB hard drive that I am sure supports ATA 100 does it not?

So I switched the hard drive and CD-ROM cables from the Primary and Secondary IDE ports to the Primary and Secondary ATA100 ports on the motherboard (which is an ASUS A7V133).

I did so and I enable the Ultra ATA 100 in the BIOS, and so what happened was that initially where it shows you the CPU speed, amount of RAM, etc. it did not detect anything for Primary Master, Primary Slave, etc. But it DID detect the hard drive and CD-ROM once the Ultra ATA100 screen came up. So I thought everything was doing alright, but once I got to windows, it would load up the background, but it would not load up anything else past that. I even set the CPU speed back to its default 800 Mhz and it still did not work. When I Ctrl-alt-del there is some program that is not responding.

Why am I having a problem running this hard drive on ATA100 mode? I have the cables back onto the normal Primary IDE ports, and it works fine. Is there anyone familiar with the ASUS A7V133 mobo that could help me get my hard drive and CD-ROM to run on ATA 100 as opposed to whatever it is doing now... which I assume is just IDE 66 or something... I am not even sure. :\ Thanks in advance.

Are you using a 80 wire cable?

Ah yes, the famous 80 wire cable that uses 40 pins!!
What will they think of next.

That is a good drive and you can find out a lot about it here:
http://www.westerndigital.com/products/drives/wd200bb.html

How do I know that they are 80 wire cables or not? Will it say so on the cables themselves?

OK this is what came with the motherboard, therefore this is what I am using: it says in the mobo manual in these words:

2 40-pin 80-conductor ribbon cable for internal UltraDMA/100 / UltraDMA/66 (also compatible with UltraDMA/33 IDE drives/devices.)

(80-wire) = (80-conductor)

Nomenclature

The 80-conductor ribbon cable has a ground conductor between each data-carrying conductor, reducing “cross-talk” and interference between them.

As far as the ATA 100 issue on this board, the A7V133 uses an onboard ATA 100 controller for the primary IDE channels and the Promise ATA 100 / RAID 0 controller for the secondary channels. From what I can surmise from both the A7V and the A7V133 manuals, the earlier A7V had only ATA66 and lower support on the primary channels and ATA 100 support on the secondary channels while the A7V133 has ATA 100 support on both the primary and the secondary channels. This being true, you should not expect an increase in hard drive performance by using the Promise controller and will see a longer boot time, unless of course you intend on using the onboard RAID feature of that board.

Good Luck!

I'm having skepticism about this hard drive running as Ultra DMA100... My hard drive did not come with any disks or anything, just the hard drive itself, so I went to Western Digital's website and downloaded what I needed. I went in to enable UDMA 100 and it says that it already is enabled and running as UDMA 100. The thing is, when I benchmark it in SiSoft Sandra, I am skeptical.

I am assuming that a higher "Drive Index" means better performance in the hard drive. Mine is 5456. I don't like the comparisons it shows... it says that a "ATA U 4200 RPM 6.4 GB" hard drive is at 6500. Why would my ATA100 supported, 20 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive have a lower score? It even has a "ATA U66 7200 RPM 28 GB" hard drive at 17000. And a "ATA U33 5400 RPM 10 GB" hard drive at 8000. To me, my hard drive seems to be getting a heck of a low score... so can anyone help me out? Do I need to somehow enable UDMA100 in the operating system, and if so how do I do that?

Thanks.

I dont know what os you are using but if its win 9x you go start-settings-control panel-system-device manager-disk drives-your hard drive-properties-settings. The if there is a dma box make sure a check mark is in the box.

OK I am officially a moron. I did just that and now I scored 15051. Yet that is lower than a "ATA U66 7200 RPM 28 GB" hard drive. I am gonna go into that Western Digital thingie I downloaded and see what it says now, I shall report the results again after that.

Thank you Placid.

Hmmm.... the proggy still says 100. I benched it again in SiSoft Sandra and came up with about the same score at 15177... still slower than some ATA66 hard drive. While I am happy it is faster, I really think it should be getting closer to the "ATA U100 7200 RPM 30 GB" hard drive which it says is 24000. :\ Anyone got any suggestions for me to reach that same score...? I don't know what is going on.

15k is a ok score for a 20gig drive.
You might try different via ide busmaster drivers and see if you get higher.


http://www.viahardware.com/download/index.shtm#4in1

From what I've seen, the Western Digital drives tend to bench at lower scores than some of the higher performance drives such as the IBM's, although still at an acceptable level.

I have better than a half of a dozen of them, ATA 100's 20G and larger, very reliable.

i was scoring a 16000 then i installed the beta ide drivers from via hardware.com and now i get 20641, might give it a shot