ATA/100 problem

[Guest]

I recently bought an Iwill KK266 motherboard and installed a new Quantum ata/100(master) and my old WD ata/66(slave) on the primary IDE channel. When I first benchmarked the Quantum using Sandra, I got the expected 20,000+ score. A few days later I re-benched it and found it to be running at ata/33 speeds. DMA is checked on both drives. Could there be a problem with the motherboard or maybe with the IDE cable? Are there any other settings in Win98 that would affect the data rate of the hard drive?

 

[pvsurfer]

Furst off, I think Win98 may have preceeded ata100, so make sure you have all the MS updates (search their Win98 knowledge base). Secondly, download the latest Via 4 in 1 driver set.

 

[Ncogneto]

most likely the cable. Is there a utility for controlling which mode of transfer you are using with your motherboard? I would suggest removing the ata/66 drive temporarily and test without it and see what happens.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Guest]

I finally determined that it was CPUIdle which was causing the problem. Once I stopped it from running in the background, the speeds returned to normal.