KT7A and UDMA 100 - myth or fact?

[OmegaParticle]

Hi - fairly new to all this so my question may seem a bit lame...I hope you can help as it's driving me nuts!

I recently installed a KT7A mobo (no RAID) and 2 Fujitsu PicoBird HDDs (both have UMDA 100 capability), one @ 5200rpm, the other @ 7200 rpm. However, I set them as UMDA 100 in the BIOS and confirmed this on the BIOS startup screen: "LBA, ATA UMDA 100"...etc. but they are running slow..and I mean S..L..O..W - my old mobo would boot into Windows 98SE in about 30s, now it takes over 60s!?

The drives are both on the IDE1, 80PIN cable, with the 7200 as master. I've loaded the VIA Bus Master drivers which shows up as such in Device Manager, the drives show up as "Primary/Secondary Bus Master IDE controller (dual FIFO)". Under 'Disk Drives' they are listed as "Generic IDE Disk Type 47", whereas under my old mobo they were listed here as Fujitsu drives?? Both have DMA enabled and I have installed the latest Abit service pack 4.29 to no avail...

I'm tearing my hair out - should they show up in device manager as Fujitsu drives as before? This seems like a Windows driver issue as they are correctly reported by the BIOS as ATA100 drives....?? Has anyone had a similar issue - do your drives run as UMDA 100 and how can you tell? I would be really grateful for any advice as I'm rapidly going bald!!

Thanks

 

[Kev]

are you sure DMA is enabled on the drives? ...just right click on them and check DMA mode...thats a common mistake...enabling it makes a HUGE performance gain....if you've already done that, make sure the drives are in FAT32..that may help......otherwise, im stuck for ideas

 

[JEFF]

i dont think both drives should be on ide1,especially if 1 is 5400(isnt that udma 66?)put 5400 on ide 2 as master and see if that doesnt clear things up.mine are raided on 1 and 2 with vd's on 3 and 4.they seem pretty fast.

 

[SickBoy]

JEFF (Jul 15, 2001 08:52 p.m.):
i dont think both drives should be on ide1,especially if 1 is 5400(isnt that udma 66?)put 5400 on ide 2 as master and see if that doesnt clear things up.mine are raided on 1 and 2 with vd's on 3 and 4.they seem pretty fast.

5400/7200 are rotational speeds... they have nothing to do with transfer rate (pretty much). ATA/UDMA100 drives do exist in 5400 RPM speeds, and there are many drives that are 7200 RPM that are only ATA/UDMA66.

SickBoy

 

[Ridenow]

What OS are you running? There is a known issue with W2K and the Via IDE drivers. You might try deinstalling the Via drivers and letting the default OS's IDE drivers run.
Does it load other things slow as well or just on boot up? Since it is a different motherboard there are different drivers that are loaded on boot than on your old system, one of them may just be slow.

 

[supraway]

Are you using an 80 conductor cable? I understand that the motherboard shouldn't see the drives as ATA/100 if the cable is wrong, but it is just a thought...

*OOPS* sorry, didn't see that you already stated it was. Try a different cable.

 

[OmegaParticle]

Ridenow (Jul 16, 2001 01:17 p.m.):
What OS are you running? There is a known issue with W2K and the Via IDE drivers. You might try deinstalling the Via drivers and letting the default OS's IDE drivers run.
Does it load other things slow as well or just on boot up? Since it is a different motherboard there are different drivers that are loaded on boot than on your old system, one of them may just be slow.

Thanks for the ideas (all)! I've since installed W2K and have the drives running fine as UMDA100 using the Via drivers (?); on my other partition, Windows 98SE is still running slow (the original problem!). I think I will try reinstalling the OS, with as few cards in the mobo as possible and see if that makes any difference?