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Hi,
I purchased a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 NCQ 120GB 6L120M0 SATA 8MB Cache from OcUK a week or two ago. I also have a new ASUS P4P800-E-Deluxe m/board running my old 2.4GHz PIV (C1, not hyperthreading) and 2Gb PC2700 RAM. Basically apart from the m/board and the SATA disk this system is my old system which has run fine for 3 1/2 years. Until I got this new disk I have been using WD Caviar IDE drives which are very nice.
My problem is that the WD Caviars out perform the new SATA disk I have. I've spent a long time trying to diagnose the problem and I'm still stumped. Basically when WinXP Pro boots up, the channel that drive is on shows as UDMA-5 in the device manager. In the bios it is happily detected as SATA and suggests UDMA-6. (All the other BIOS settings have painstakingly been checked.) However, as soon as windows has been running for a few minutes it reverts to PIO mode in Device Manager and everything is slow. I tried testing it many times with HDTach...if I run HDTach immediately after windows starts the first three sections of the quick test are fine, Burst ~135Mb/s, CPU ~ 2% and Random Access is ok too. But once the sequential read test comes along the drive manages a superb 3.1 Mb/s. (HD Tach 3) Any subsequent tests utilise 100% CPU and are slow on everything, the burst rate also comes out as circa 3Mb/s.
I have two ATA/SATA controllers on my m/board Intel's ICH5R and a Promise 378 RAID, I have tried both. Intel's one is the default and has these problems. Promise's one I installed windows on, but half way through booting it resets so I can't tell if that would work or not. The Intel chipset is the one I should be using really though. Anyway, I downloaded Maxtor's test utility (boot disk ISO) and the drive passed the first three tests on there. I put the drive in a different computer, it ran fine there. So I'm pretty confident the drive is not faulty.
What am I doing wrong? Why does my drive not work in WinXP? Is this a hardware problem, a drivers problem (I have the latest Intel chipset drivers) or is WinXP just living up to normal Microsoft's usual standards?
Any advice on how to fix this problem would be most appreciated, failing that I will revert to IDE (which works fine on this new m/board) and I will have wasted £60 on a nice SATA drive. Apologies for the long post, but I have spent a long time on this and I wanted to include as much detail as I could remember.
Thanks,
Foamy
I purchased a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 NCQ 120GB 6L120M0 SATA 8MB Cache from OcUK a week or two ago. I also have a new ASUS P4P800-E-Deluxe m/board running my old 2.4GHz PIV (C1, not hyperthreading) and 2Gb PC2700 RAM. Basically apart from the m/board and the SATA disk this system is my old system which has run fine for 3 1/2 years. Until I got this new disk I have been using WD Caviar IDE drives which are very nice.
My problem is that the WD Caviars out perform the new SATA disk I have. I've spent a long time trying to diagnose the problem and I'm still stumped. Basically when WinXP Pro boots up, the channel that drive is on shows as UDMA-5 in the device manager. In the bios it is happily detected as SATA and suggests UDMA-6. (All the other BIOS settings have painstakingly been checked.) However, as soon as windows has been running for a few minutes it reverts to PIO mode in Device Manager and everything is slow. I tried testing it many times with HDTach...if I run HDTach immediately after windows starts the first three sections of the quick test are fine, Burst ~135Mb/s, CPU ~ 2% and Random Access is ok too. But once the sequential read test comes along the drive manages a superb 3.1 Mb/s. (HD Tach 3) Any subsequent tests utilise 100% CPU and are slow on everything, the burst rate also comes out as circa 3Mb/s.
I have two ATA/SATA controllers on my m/board Intel's ICH5R and a Promise 378 RAID, I have tried both. Intel's one is the default and has these problems. Promise's one I installed windows on, but half way through booting it resets so I can't tell if that would work or not. The Intel chipset is the one I should be using really though. Anyway, I downloaded Maxtor's test utility (boot disk ISO) and the drive passed the first three tests on there. I put the drive in a different computer, it ran fine there. So I'm pretty confident the drive is not faulty.
What am I doing wrong? Why does my drive not work in WinXP? Is this a hardware problem, a drivers problem (I have the latest Intel chipset drivers) or is WinXP just living up to normal Microsoft's usual standards?
Any advice on how to fix this problem would be most appreciated, failing that I will revert to IDE (which works fine on this new m/board) and I will have wasted £60 on a nice SATA drive. Apologies for the long post, but I have spent a long time on this and I wanted to include as much detail as I could remember.
Thanks,
Foamy
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