Promise ATA100 Problem

[gjkozick]

First off, I have an Asus A7V, which has an onboard Promise ATA100 controller. Their documentation makes a big deal about there being no slow-downs when a slower drive is run on the same channel as a faster drive. I had my Primary hard drive on the CONTROLLER's PRIMARY, and an Asus 50x Max on the CONTROLLER's SECONDARY. I also have an 8.4GB ATA66 drive on my PRIMARY IDE and an HP 9500 CD-RW on my SECONDARY IDE.

The problem is, whenever I accessed my CD ROM, the Hard Drive would slow down, causing my system to hang. I'd pop in a CD and my mouse and the rest of the system would freeze until after the auto-run menu came up. After that, everything would run fine.

System Components-

Windows 98se
Thunderbird 900
Asus A7V
Wester Digital WD400 40.0GB ATA100 7200 rpm
256MB of PC133 2-2-2

Thanks

 

[ejsmith2]

Have you tried the 4.29 4-in-1 yet? I get good results with those under win98se/win2k, even with my old 6.4gig hard disk.

 

[Guest]

>>Their documentation makes a big deal about there being no slow-downs when a slower drive is run on the same channel as a faster drive. <<

What is meant by that is that you can run an ATA 100 drive in UDMA mode 5 even on the same channel as a drive that can only run in UDMA mode 4 or lower or even a PIO mode.

But there is not at this time any controller architecture that can overcome the limitations of the design, which is ability to only address one device per channel at a time. So if you are accessing a device on one channel especially a device with such slow access times as a CD-ROM drive, you will experience slow downs when attempting to access the other device on the channel.

***check the jumpers 1st then check em again***

 

[gjkozick]

I actually have the ATA100 Harddrive on a different channel than the CD-ROM (UDMA33). One is on Primary, the other is on Secondary of my on-board controller

 

[Guest]

well there are known issues using ATAPI devices on these ATA controllers as well. You may be running into this. Move your 8.4G to the ATA controller's secondary and the CD-ROM to your motherboard's native primary controller. This should take care of the problem.

***check the jumpers 1st then check em again***