Incredible slow hdd read speed

[NatteDraak]

Hi there,


My system consists of a P5Q motherboard, with 3 harddrives:


1: WD 80GB IDE (slave, primary)
2: WD 640GB Black SATAII (boot, primary, active)
3: WD 640GB Black SATAII (primary)


When I run HDTune, both the SATA drives show read speeds of 116MB/s. But the IDE drive shows read speads of 14MB/s?
As a test, it takes 10 seconds to move 1GB from 1 stata drive to the other, but it takes 1 minute to move 1GB from a sata to the ide drive. Oh, and in return it takes again only 10 seconds to move 1GB from the ide drive to a sata drive.

Please tell me that's impossible and something is not setup right

Thanks, greets Rowan.

 

[NatteDraak]

I just found out through Device Manager that my P5Q motherboard automatically sets a DMA mode for this drive. The SATA drives get Ultra DMA 5, and the IDE drive gets Multi Word DMA mode 2.

I rebooted my PC and now the IDE drive recieved Ultra DMA mode 2, read speeds have gone up to 26MB/s.


Any way I can assign Ultra DMA mode 5 to this drive??


Greets Rowan.

 

[daship]

Toss the old drive in the trash.

 

[NatteDraak]

Nah, it's a dedicated audio tracking drive.

Ok I have set the jumper to slave, cable select and nothing but to no avail. BIOS only let's me configure the DMA mode on the SATA drives.

Anyone?

 

[jsc]

What kind of IDE cable do you have on the drive?

There's two kinds - the old, standard 40 pin with a 40 wire ribbon cable and a newer kind with 80 wires. The extra go between the others to act as a shield. Newer (the last few years) motherboards can detect the difference and will automatically assign a higher DMA protocol.

If you have an older IDE cable, replace it with a newer one. It may help. Otherwise, either live with the lack of speed, or replace the drive - about your only two choices.

 

[NatteDraak]

I used the IDE cable that came with my new asus p5q motherboard.

There should be nothing wrong with the drive itself, it has always functioned properly until last week, when I put it in my new PC. HDTune also revealed no errors.

I am going to try an older IDE cable where it was connected with before, maybe there's indeed something wrong with the one I'm using now.


Thanks for your help, greets Rowan.

 

[Kursun]

Back when I had XP as OS I used to use a program called resetdma when my ide dvd recorded started to stutter. Following links should provide you enough information:
http://winhlp.com/node/10
http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=61905

 

[NatteDraak]

Well, learn from your mistakes I guess. Turns out an IDE cable uses:

color: motherboard
gray: slave drive
black: master drive

I had gray in the motherboard, and blue in the HDD hehe. Fixed that, but it wouldn't recognize the drive on master jumper, so I set it on slave.

Also used the "resetdma" script, so thanks for that.


Now getting speeds of 56mb/s. That's maximum for ATA-100 drives right?


Greets Rowan.

 

[leo2kp]

56 is probably about where you would expect a drive that old.

 

[NatteDraak]

56 is probably about where you would expect a drive that old.

"That old" as in 'ATA-100' or "that old" as in 'I don't really know but I'm laughing at you using an older drive'?

Greets Rowan