Help Hdd speedS and UDMA

[Guzman]

Hi all
I need some help with Hdd speeds have just downloaded "Raptest" to check the system after getting frozen out at rendering stage in Unlead Video Studio with message (unable to write to drive). From this I had to reboot, then the problems started. Prior to the freeze the dv editing has been excellent.
After many futile attempts to defrag/scandisc was forced to reformat video drive
Thinking it was a speed problem ran "Raptest" which to my horror gave read and write speeds as follows
Boot drive Read 11 Mb Write 6.2 Mb
Video drive Read 2.2 Mb Write 3.5 Mb

DMA is enabled and have run configuration as network sever and desktop these are the best speeds so far. At boot up drives are reported as UDMA 2
Both drives are on the same channel and connected with 80 pin cable
.
Went to Maxtors site and downloaded their test diagnostic progs
"POWERMAX . EXE" disc check utility
"UDMAUPDT . EXE" both types 100UPDT.EXE and 66TO100.EXE UDMA reporting utility on the first test (installation confirmation)
The drive failed at " SMART attribute check" code 005
this turns out to be BIOS doesn't support capacity and/or LBA not enabled in BIOS.

Checked LBA and all seems ok . Have now flashed to latest BIOS re-ran tests no change

Has anyone got any ideas on how to change the UDMA setting in BIOS ? as the Maxtors ulitity does not have any effect on boot screen UDMA settings

ANY HELP WOULD BE VERY GRATEFULLY RECEIVED am at my wits end??
This hobby will lead to suicide! Suicide is painless as the song goes!

Guzman
System specs
450 MHz Pentium 3 INTEL(R)440bx chipset
Micro Star MS 6156 VER 1.0 BX7 motherboard 100 MHz bus ( supports DMA 66)
256mb ram
Boot drive13 Gb Fujitsu MPD 3130AT 5400rpm Ultra-DMA66 ATA primary (master)
Video drive Maxtor VL40 30.7Gb 9.5ms 5400rpm UDMA100 primary (slave)
PYRO Digital 1394DV card
DVD/ROM drive Toshiba SDM 1212 secondary (master)
CD-RW drive Freecom secondary (slave)
Iomega usb zip
Graphics ATI All -in wonder 128 pro card
Running 98 se

[classicsoftware]

Open the case and check the connections. Assuming they are all tight, try to run the drives on different channels and see if that improves performance. From my experience with burning CD'S, if the hard drive and the CD-Burner are on the same channel, you make a lot of coasters. Try to run them on different channels, it's easy to do...

[iisbob]

classicsoftware is right, any peripheral you have hooked in with the hardrive will affect it's speed; ie since cd players/writers run only a 33mb's persec, you're killing your HD-which can run at double that spec. Try to either use the cdwriter as master on the secoindary ide channel, or if you have a cdplayer then hook the burner up as slave on the seconday ide. Also make sure you have nothing running in the background when you are burning a CD, as this is a vey cpu cycle intensive chore and can cuase frequent crashes and " coasters ". http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

Uh, must be the late hour-sorry i see you've already got the correct cd setup. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif But think about the rest of what i said, could be your error. as for UDMA in the bios, if you go into your " intergrated perpherals " section you should see an option for " auto " enable UDMA - make sure that's what it is set too.
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iisbob
"Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run."

[This message has been edited by iisbob (edited 07-25-2001).]