How can I tell if my HD is using ATA-33?
The HD (quantum fireball lm-plus) supports ATA-66, but my mobo (elitegroup P5SD-B+) only supports 33. I have connected the HD with a standard 40 pin cable (less than 18 inches). All drivers that came w/ the mobo have been installed, but there was no Bus Mastering driver, just a PCI IRQ router and some USB router.
The DMA box will not stay checked in the HD properties.
POST screen says C: drive ...... UDMA
HD Tach reports that the drive has read speed of 8 and seek time of 12 (I forget the units of measurement....), which is not significantly faster than the old PIO 1 gig drives I used to use (was 10+16, if I remember correctly).
There was some Debug routines that I found on the net (I forget the URL) that apparently indicate the drive supports up to UDMA 4 (Which I already knew), but since I know that the mobo only supports up to UDMA 2, I suspect this means nothing.
My main concerns are a) the DMA box - isn't this necessary? and b) the HD Tach results - I'm no expert, but this wasn't the type of performance increase I was expecting between PIO 4 @ 5400rpm and UDMA 2 @ 7200 rpm.
You won't be able to enable DMA unless you set the drive to UDMA-33. You can normally do this by setting a jumper on the back of the drive or by using some software. Have a look at Quantum's site. They should have a utility to change the UDMA mode.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks