- Joined
- Dec 22, 2000
This may not work for all of you, but I have been around the farm so to speak with this board, had some major issues, tried a TON of "fixes" (none of which worked) and finally hit the right combination.
I have two Western Digital ATA66 7200 RPM drives in this rig, along with my SBLive. I was getting CRAPPY hard drive benches, like PIO mode scores. RAID 0, regular IDE controllers, you name it, the speeds SUCKED.
Sp i took the SBLive out, formatted, and reinstalled Win2k, thinking the SBLive had pooch screwed the system. Guess what, it was NOT entirely the SBLive...my Western Digital drives STILL performed in PIO mode even though device manager reported UDMA. I tried the hotfix from Microsoft, various versions of VIA 4-in-1's, disabling UDMA in bios, manually setting drive mode with the WD utility, seperate channels, cable select, etc., etc.
Tried every fix known to man, none worked.
By now I was PISSED. I had had it, and came across a tidbit of info somewhere saying something about ACPI. I promptly "upgraded" my ACPI Computer in device manager to a "standard pc" and rebooted. This changed all the IRQ settings obviously, and the SBLive is on it's own non-shared IRQ of 12. After installing my device drivers again, including putting the SBLive back in and installing the Liveware 3.0 drivers, I ran all the tests again. SUCCESS!!!!!
Both drives now are scoring 2000+ over the default scores, and burst reads went from @23mb/sec to 57mb/sec.........over double! Access times also dropped from 18ms to 10ms....average transfer rate went from 18mb/sec to 27mb/sec....
I also transferred several gigs of data back and forth between the drives, including loading 2 cd's of mp3's onto the drives. NO errors, NONE AT ALL.
The only drawback I have found is that the built in cooling of Win2k is no longer working, I tried using WPCRSET to change register 52 back to "EB" but no luck. It still idles at 39c, just 4c lower than maximum load. I also tried CPUIdle and same thing. No effect on idle temps. No big deal really though, my watercooling handles it fine, and since I run Folding@Home all the time anyway, it really does not matter.
So it seems the SBLive is not the only culprit here,seems that something is definitely going on with the 686b and the Western Digital drives especially...
So if you have some WD drives and have lost patience, try this, if you don't mind having a high idle temp. I won't have this cpu long enough for it to wear it out anyway...
I have two Western Digital ATA66 7200 RPM drives in this rig, along with my SBLive. I was getting CRAPPY hard drive benches, like PIO mode scores. RAID 0, regular IDE controllers, you name it, the speeds SUCKED.
Sp i took the SBLive out, formatted, and reinstalled Win2k, thinking the SBLive had pooch screwed the system. Guess what, it was NOT entirely the SBLive...my Western Digital drives STILL performed in PIO mode even though device manager reported UDMA. I tried the hotfix from Microsoft, various versions of VIA 4-in-1's, disabling UDMA in bios, manually setting drive mode with the WD utility, seperate channels, cable select, etc., etc.
Tried every fix known to man, none worked.
By now I was PISSED. I had had it, and came across a tidbit of info somewhere saying something about ACPI. I promptly "upgraded" my ACPI Computer in device manager to a "standard pc" and rebooted. This changed all the IRQ settings obviously, and the SBLive is on it's own non-shared IRQ of 12. After installing my device drivers again, including putting the SBLive back in and installing the Liveware 3.0 drivers, I ran all the tests again. SUCCESS!!!!!
Both drives now are scoring 2000+ over the default scores, and burst reads went from @23mb/sec to 57mb/sec.........over double! Access times also dropped from 18ms to 10ms....average transfer rate went from 18mb/sec to 27mb/sec....
I also transferred several gigs of data back and forth between the drives, including loading 2 cd's of mp3's onto the drives. NO errors, NONE AT ALL.
The only drawback I have found is that the built in cooling of Win2k is no longer working, I tried using WPCRSET to change register 52 back to "EB" but no luck. It still idles at 39c, just 4c lower than maximum load. I also tried CPUIdle and same thing. No effect on idle temps. No big deal really though, my watercooling handles it fine, and since I run Folding@Home all the time anyway, it really does not matter.
So it seems the SBLive is not the only culprit here,seems that something is definitely going on with the 686b and the Western Digital drives especially...
So if you have some WD drives and have lost patience, try this, if you don't mind having a high idle temp. I won't have this cpu long enough for it to wear it out anyway...
