Poor HD Tach results

[NJC]

Drive is Western Digital 80GB 8MB cache. Mine is in red - identical drive compared in blue. Something is wrong with drive's reading speed.

I have a dual boot system:

Drive C:\ 20GB XP
Drive E:\ 80GB Ubuntu/Fat32 partition.

The Fat32 partition was made in Gparted (Ubuntu). Otherwise, the Primary and Secondary controllers seem to check out fine, and Western Digital does not offer updated drivers/firmware.

 

[OVERKILL]

Chipset on motherboard? 80-conductor cable used?

 

[Colt45ws]

It looks like somewhere your BIOS its set for PIO 33MB/s interface. It needs to be set to UDMA/66 at least. UDMA/100 might be marginally better. You need to dig around. Also make sure its on a newer IDE cable with a blue connector on the motherboard side.
Yeah, 80 conductor. I was trying to remember how many wires those have..

 

[NJC]

Never knew there was a difference between 40 and 80 pin connectors. I changed the 40 pin to an 80 pin and re-ran the test with resulting no joy.

Chipset is intel 82801AA and I'm going to check firmware updates now. Onmo'Eegusee, this is a [censored] Dell GX110, so the BIOS has no DMA/PIO drive settings.

 

[Colt45ws]

Check in the windows Device Manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Double click on the IDE channel the drive is on, go to advanced settings and make sure it is set to "DMA if available" in the transfer mode box for both devices. Go ahead and check both IDE channels. Also on the device manager list it should say what brand and type of IDE controller this is..

 

[Colt45ws]

I found a intel PDF describing that southbridge. Its their ICH Controller.. From what I see, it should be capable of up to UDMA/66.

 

[NJC]

Both channels on Primary/Secondary IDE are set to DMA if available, using Ultra DMA mode 2. And Intel 82801AA is the IDE controller.

 

[Colt45ws]

Hmm, for some reason your controller is thinking you are using 40 conductor cable. You can only use up to UDMA Mode 2 with a 40 conductor cable. Mode 2 is still 33MB/s. We want to see Mode 3 or 4, 66MB/s..
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html
Something similar to that 80 conductor is what you have right?

 

[NJC]

Something is effed-up with the chipset. I ran Intel Chipset Software Installation and it claimed to already recognize it properly. I then ran Intel Application Accelerator and it fixed the problem. New HD Tach results:

Device Manager shows different options under Primary/Secondary IDE now. THANKS for the help!

That should make a big difference, at least in Windoze.

 

[Colt45ws]

Nice! Does it seem any faster?

 

[tmorris1]

Originally Posted By: NJC
Something is effed-up with the chipset. I ran Intel Chipset Software Installation and it claimed to already recognize it properly. I then ran Intel Application Accelerator and it fixed the problem. New HD Tach results:


Nothing is effed up. Somebody beat me to the punch. When you ran the Intel Application Accelerator it installs the driver and configures them to run in UDMA mode. I had this same problem at work until I ran the Intel App Accel. The should have named it something different because I didn't want to install it until I read what it did. You are good to go now.

 

[NJC]

Originally Posted By: Onmo'Eegusee
Nice! Does it seem any faster?

I briefly tested by scrolling through my picture director - IE fairly data intensive. It did seem faster. I also need to check which UDMA this drive is at in Ubuntu.

 

[Colt45ws]

hdparm

 

[NJC]

For those interested, checking DMA in Linux:

sudo hdparm -i /dev/sdx (replace x with a/b/c etc)

Quote:
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 *udma4 udma5
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: Unspecified: ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6

* signifies the current active mode