Yesterday I installed a new 160GB Western Digital HD and set it up as the slave drive. today i have noticed that the read rate on the new hard drive is very slow. i tried watching a movie that i had originally on my old HD off of the new drive and it was very choppy (skipped at least 10-12 second at a time). not to mention it took about 12 minutes to copy the 700MB movie to the new hard drive. the movie works fine on my old HD. any ideas?
the 160 GB is the slave to the original drive, which is a 55.8GB. as for the ide cable i used the one that was already in my computer, not the one that was supplied with the new HD. i have no idea if its a 40 or 80 wire one.
Here some info on the cables, you should be able to compare yours http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html Also, have you got DMA enabled on your new HD? System Properties Hardware Device Manager IDE ATA/ATAPI controller Primary controller Advanced Settings Device 1 (Transfer mode DMA if available, current transfer mode DMA xxx)
it is say DMA if available but it is in PIO mode. i tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver to make it DMA but it's still in PIO. im going to replace the cable tomorrow i hope it works
Is the cable 40 way or 80 way? Which driver did you uninstall - the HD itself or the Primary IDE controller? If it was just the HD itself, unistall the Primary HD controller and see if it cures it. BTWon't worry about uninstalling the controller, just reboot afterwards and Windows will reinstall it.
the new cable is an 80 way. i didnt check how many conductors the one inside the PC has. (oops) i uninstalled the "primary IDE channel" driver and rebooted. is that the right one or should i have done the Intel Ultra ATA Storage Controller?
Ahhhh, that'll be it............ Did it alter when you uninstalled the Primary controller? If it didn't (and I don't think it did), then try the the Intel one, that should set you straight......................
Tell you what try the following: Uninstall the Intel controller, reboot but don't reinstall it. Uninstall the HD - but don't reboot Uninstall the Primary controller, then reboot Any change? If not, heres another possible option, you may have to remove/swap another device around if you have one on the Secondary IDE. I am actually wondering whether there is an issue with both HD's being on the same cable. Have you got a Secondary IDE port (and cable) on the motherboard, configure it as Master on the Secondary and see if DMA pops back in there..............
alright after all this stuff i finally found the problem. Dell has a bad bios configuration that wont allow for primary slave drives to use DMA. The only thing I needed to do was change that BIOS setting and now it works perfectly fine. Thanks for your help ddp.
Bit late, but [bold]oooooooooh Yes[/bold] Shall make a note of that one aswell, as I think others shall come across that little nasty. Anyways ,glad to have helped and [bold]Welcome to Afterdawn[/bold]
